Problems with twa

[Ivan Voras]

Giulio Ferro wrote:
> I've installed a 3ware 9500 sata controller with 4 1TB disks
> in raid 5.
> Apart from the usual wrong geometry warning the starting configuration
> is ok: I create a single partition with the default labels plus a /usr/home
> label with takes most of the disk space (about 2.7TB).
> 
> When I reboot the system the /usr/home partition size drops unexplainably
> to about 640GB.
> 
> In order to try to understand what happens I've installed freebsd anew,
> this
> time creating 2 partitions: the first one 50GB, the second about 2.7TB (the
> remaining space). Everything seems to work correctly.
> I reboot the system and lo! the second partitions shrinks to about 640GB
> and
> the partitioner (using sysinstall) tells me that there are 2048GB free!
> 
> This happens both with freebsd 7 and 8 current amd64.
> 
> Thanks for any help.

It's probably because you cannot create bsdlabels or fdisk partitions
larger than 2 TB. The sizes you're seeing are probably because of
overflows in calculations. It's not that the OS doesn't support larger
drives, the problem is the partition formats.

You might succeed by creating two large partitions, one ending just
before the 2 TB limit and one stretching the rest of the space, but a
more robust way would be to either create two smaller volumes (if the
controller supports creating them on the array) or you'll need to
install FreeBSD on a separate, smaller array and partition the large
array with GPT (or use ZFS).

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