On Tue, 28 Nov 2006 at 12:56pm, Kevan Benson wrote
> I have a 3.5 TB RAID 5 Array through a 3ware 9590SE 8 port card, and am
> running into what seems like quite a lot of problems trying to get the system
> installed correctly. The system is a running dual Opterons with 2 GB of RAM,
> and I'm attempting to install through the x86_64 ServerCD.
>
> First, grub refuses to install on the disk, as it's too large. I can get
> around this though by booting Fedora Core 6 in rescue mode and running grub,
> as it can deal with the disk size correctly. This might only be working when
> I attempt installs that don't utilize as much of the array as possible though
> (100 MB /boot, 2GB swap, 10Gb /, the rest left unallocated).
>
> Secondly, there seems to be a problem using msdos disk labels with large
> partitions, and I can't seem to find any solutions to this in the manuals or
> on the net. GPT labels are offered as a solution to this but only for
> Itanium systems.
>
> Am I missing some obvious solution to this? Are there some best practices for
> dealing with large disks anyone can share that may save me problems now or
> later? I'm open to suggestions, as all I've encountered so far are problems.
1) You cannot use a msdos disk label on a disk >2TiB. You must use GPT.
2) No current boot loader understands GPT disk labels.
3) Therefore, you cannot boot from a disk >2TiB.
Possible solutions are:
1) Install a 2nd disk/array for the OS, and use the big array for data.
2) Turn on the 3ware's auto-carving feature, which will divide the single
RAID volume into multiple disks, none larger than 2TiB.
--
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University