[CentOS] Large disk support

Tue Nov 28 21:07:12 UTC 2006
chrism at imntv.com <chrism at imntv.com>

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.
>
>   

On two different systems with hardware similar to yours, I ended up 
using 2 different solutions.  :)  On one, I simply replaced 2 of the 
750gig 'cudas in an 8 disk array with 160gig drives and then created a 
RAID1 on those 2 drives for the OS.  After the OS was installed, I then 
used parted to create the gpt label on the large array and created the 
filesystem on it. 

On another system, I really needed the ports on the 3ware for the array 
so I installed a pair of 160gig drives using a cheapo dual port SATA 
card and used software RAID 1 on those two drives for the OS install.  
After the system was installed, I then used parted to create the GPT 
label on the large array and created the filesystem on it.

If you go back through the list archives a bit, you'll see a bunch of 
very useful information from a couple of months ago where a number of 
people offered excellent tuning suggestions.  If you get stuck, shoot me 
some email off list and I'll see if I can give you a hand.

Cheers,