[CentOS] booting from a +2TB disk

Joshua Baker-LePain jlb17 at duke.edu
Sat Sep 3 10:31:32 UTC 2005


On Sat, 3 Sep 2005 at 12:07am, Peter Arremann wrote

> On Friday 02 September 2005 22:26, Akop Pogosian wrote:
> > I have been trying to install CentOS 4.1 on a new server today. The
> > installation went fine but the system doesn't boot. It doesn't even
> > get to the Grub screen. The system has a 3ware 9500 series controller
> > and 12 250GB SATA disks which are configured for RAID5 with one hot
> > spare.  I searched on the web and noticed that this is a Grub (and
> > Lilo) limitation. Is there any way around it other than setting up a
> > smaller RAID device?
>
> Grub has a 2TB limitation - always did... even the latest 1.90 release still 
> has that issue. The only reasonable ways to get around that is to split your 
> array into <2TB pieces or to get another disk for booting... 

Splitting the array will only work if by that you mean having multiple 
arrays (showing up as separate "disks"), one of which is <2TiB.  The 
problem isn't that grub has a problem with >2TiB disks directly, it's that 
you can't use an msdos disk label on a disk >2TiB -- you must use gpt.  
And neither grub nor lilo understand gpt disk labels.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University



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