---- Jon Peatfield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Thu, 26 Jul 2007, Michael H. Semcheski wrote: > > > So... I haven't gotten to a successful installation yet, but I think I > > figured out what the problem was. > > > > I had a 3ware 9650se driving a 4x750 raid5. What I forgot to was > > carve (I think this is the term) a boot volume out of the main array. > > That is, now I've got one 50GB drive, and one 2045GB drive, but they > > have the same constituent drives. > > Doesn't the 'standard' PC partition-table only allow access up to 2TB for > devices anyway? I'd failed to spot that your total size ended up being > (just) over 2TB which probably causes all sorts of issues... >
I have a 6x500GB array on a 3ware9650SE running just fine as a single volume (2.3TB). The partition type is 'ee' (EFI GPT) according to fdisk. Although, fdisk is broken with this large of a volume. Other tools such as sfdisk can handle them no problem. df handles it just fine as well. This is a debian 4 (etch) setup. You may need to pre-partition the drive if the SL installer cannot handle it. One difference with my setup is that I use a standalone 250GB drive for the OS. I've never liked the idea of booting from a raid, although I do it standard for customers in a raid 1 configuration with 2x250GB drives on SL 4.1. > On the boxes we have with larger raid setups, we are lucky enough that > they can all chop up the raidset into <2TB chunks which get presented to > the OS as seperate disks, which we can then join back together with LVM... > > Apparently some raid devices can't do the chopping - I've heard this is > true of some megaraid cards but have never used them myself - at least not > for so long that 2TB was unthinkable at the time... > This seems like an ugly hack. One should not have to use LVM in conjunction with hardware raid. > > PC's (as far as I know) can't boot off of a block device that holds > > more than XGB, where X is > 50 but less than 2045. Many RAID cards > > allow you to create a smaller boot parition (which looks like a > > seperate scsi disk to the OS) but is part of the main array. > This is the first I've heard of 50GB < X < 2045GB causing problems. Boot loaders, specifically LILO, had trouble in the past with booting from a partition beyond the 1024th cylinder, but that has long since been remedied. > Support for >2TB devices is apparently possible at least with some > hardware/drivers but when I asked (a year or two ago - so it may be out of > date) I was strongly advised to avoid it for a while 'cos that code is new > and less well tested. Anyway you need to use one of the new fancy > partition-table formats... > Greater than 2TB devices/volumes are well supported with any modern kernel and should no longer be a problem. > > Like I said, I haven't finished, because I'm in the process of > > rebuilding the array. But I'll bet thats what the problem was. > > In another 12-24 months I guess single disks >2TB will be out and all > these things will need to work directly! > Hope some of that helped! Cheers, Mark -- ---- Mr. Mark V. Stodola Digital Systems Engineer National Electrostatics Corp. P.O. Box 620310 Middleton, WI 53562-0310 USA Phone: (608) 831-7600 Fax: (608) 831-9591