On Mon, 25 Apr 2005 at 4:12pm, John Moylan wrote
> I installed centos4 on a raid system with 7 400GB Hitachi SATA disks in
> RAID 5 on the 3Ware card. I set up a 2.2TB EXT3 Partition /opt.
>
*snip*
> Using /dev/sda
> (parted) print
> Disk geometry for /dev/sda: 0.000-2288754.000 megabytes
> Disk label type: msdos
> Minor Start End Type Filesystem Flags
> 1 0.031 101.975 primary ext3 boot
> 2 101.975 5098.754 primary linux-swap
> 3 5098.755 7091.191 primary ext3
> 4 7091.191 191600.624 extended
> 5 7091.222 9083.627 logical ext3
> 6 9083.659 11076.064 logical ext3
> (parted) mkpart logical ext3 11076.065 2288754
> Warning: You requested to create a partition at 11076.065-2288754.000Mb.
> The closest Parted can manage is 11076.095-191595.520Mb.
> OK/Cancel?
>
> Any one have experience/ideas?
Yes. Oh yes. And I was so annoyed by the experience that I submitted a
documentation erratum to RH about it (see
<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=155728>). I'll
detail it a bit here for the archives.
The short version is You Can't Do That. Disk devices >2TB require gpt
disk labels. msdos disk labels (as you have above) can't handle devices
of that size. And neither grub nor lilo know how to boot from a gpt
labelled device. So, ATM, you cannot boot from a device >2TB.
Your only option at this point is to add in a new boot device and install
to that. Once you've done that, go ahead and use parted on your big
array, being sure to 'mklabel gpt' before you make any partitions on it.
--
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University
