[CentOS] Centos 5 on Large Disks.

Tue Oct 23 08:29:08 UTC 2007
James A. Peltier <jpeltier at cs.sfu.ca>

James A. Peltier wrote:
> Anup Shukla wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> Sorry if this has been answered many times.
>> But i have been going through a lot of pages (via google search).
>> The more i search, the more its confusing me.
>>
>> I have a server with 6 (750G each) SATA disks with H/W Raid 5.
>>
>> I plan to allocate the space as follows
>>
>> swap 8G
>> /boot 100M
>> / 20G
>> -- and remaining space to /data{1,2,3,N} (equal sizes)
>>
>> However after the installation and reboot, i got an error about bad 
>> partition for /data8
>>
>> I had hit the 2T limit.
>>
>> Then i found this page at 
>> http://www.knowplace.org/pages/howtos/linux_large_filesystems_support.php
>>
>> which speaks of using Parted/LVM2 and XFS.
>>
>> If i understand this correctly,
>> I need to have 1 disk to host the CentOS installation.
>> And i can use the other 5 disks in a RAID array
>> (label type gpt...)
>>
>> Is it not possible to partition and use the existing RAID 5 volume?
>>
>> I really am not sure about how to proceed for this big disk problem.
>>
>> Any ideas/links will really help.
>>
>> Thank you.
>>
>> Regards,
>> A.S
>> _______________________________________________
>> CentOS mailing list
>> CentOS at centos.org
>> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
> 
> My understanding is that grub and lilo are not able to boot off of GPT 
> labeled disks currently.  Given the size of currently available disks, 
> this will probably change soon, however, for now you need a small 
> partition to boot a large disk.
> 

sorry, a bit quick off the trigger, but essentially, if you wanted to 
use a single RAID-5 volume of this size (even if you configured it as 
you said) the GPT label for the volume would be what gets you cuz of the 
boot loader.

The use of LVM and XFS, just have to do with the way they handle larger 
disks.  With LVM you can lay out the disks in a bit more fine tuned 
manner that allows you go get around some limitations in certain file 
systems.  XFS is just recommended because it is a very good performer 
and was meant to handle large file systems from its inception.  Feel 
free to use JFS, ReiserFS or your local don-juan-ho file system you like

-- 
James A. Peltier
Technical Director, RHCE
SCIRF | GrUVi @ Simon Fraser University - Burnaby Campus
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