Peter Blajev wrote:

Hi,

I've got a DAS DELL MD1000 with a bunch of SATA drives in RAID 5 configuration with total space of 5.4TB. This box is attached to a CentOS5 system (kernel 2.6.18-53.1.6.el5).

Any idea how to make this space usable? Is there a limit how big a partition can be? What is the work around? Is there a limit how big a file system ca be?

I've tried to partition it but no matter how bug partition I create fdisk spits out these messages on the console:

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sdb: very big device. try to use READ CAPACITY(16). SCSI device sdb: 10248519680 512-byte hdwr sectors (5247242 MB) sdb: Write Protect is off

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I decided to not partition the drive and use LVM but the physical volume stopped at 2TB.

So, right now I can't use LVM because of this 2TB limit and I'm not sure if I partition the drive how good these partitions are because of the the message from fdisk.

Any help or idea is highly appreciated.

Undo the LVM config, wipe out any MBR or disklabels on the drive, then pvcreate the raw disk (/dev/sdb) it should be able to handle the whole 5.4TB.

-Ross

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