On Tuesday 28 November 2006 13:07, chrism at imntv.com wrote: > 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. Thanks for all the suggestions, and to Joshua for mentioning 3ware's carving, which I wasn't aware of before this. Carving with LVM to append portions into a large LV seems to be the solution I'm leaning towards, as it seems to be the easiest to implement "out of the box" and I expect it will cause the least issues in the long run as there's no room in the chassis for more drives (it also has a tape drive) and dedicating one or two 500 GB drives to an install array seems wasteful. -- - Kevan Benson - A-1 Networks