I want to create one large LVM volume on the 2.5TB device. I seem to be able to create an LVM physical volume on the whole device, but I've read that it's better to create a single large partition for LVM as the existence of the partition informs other apps that the disk is in use which prevents accidental corruption of the LVM volume.
Creating a large partition of this size under Centos is proving to be surprisingly difficult. I am unable to get fdisk to see more that 513GB on the whole unit, and once I create one 513GB partition, I can't create any additional partitions ("no sectors available"). I've read that fdisk has trouble with large partitions and that the GNU parted program should be used instead. Problem here is that GNU parted doesn't know about many file systems and doesn't know anything about LVM. So, following some steps on the LVM Howto, I used parted to create a large ext2 partition, then used fdisk to change the type to 8e for LVM. Once I do this, I see that the partition is now 2TB in size -- close, but .5 TB short.
Why is this so difficult? How should large partitions be created under Centos?
Any help is appreciated.
Tom