SV: Mounting a large virtual disk

[Patrik Jansson]

>I have a PowerEdge 2850 with a PERC 5/I card which I connect to a MD1000
>storage system which consists of 6 SATA disks each of 500GB. I have created
>a hardware RAID 5 of all disks and FreeBSD recognize this as /dev/mfid0. So
>I go into sysinstall to create something to mount and then Fdisk complains
>about the geometry, it says: "A geometry of 303672/255/63 for mfid0 is
>incorrect." and that I ought to set this myself but I have no idea which
>geometry to use. I have tried to just ignore this and use the entire disk
>and then in the Disklabel editor I have made a label of the entire
partition
> (2326G). When pressing W to write it says "Error mounting /dev/mfid0s1d on
>/backup : No such file or directory" and that's because it's called
>/dev/mfid0s1c and not d. I have tried to ignore this aswell and run newfs
>manually "newfs /dev/mfid0s1c" and it outputs a whole bunch of numbers and
>returns without errors. But when I mount this partition its size is just
>269G of which 248G is available. How do I use the entire disk?


I found a solution on another mailing list and that is to use gpt instead of
fdisk. First of all, remove the MBR so that gpt doesn't complain:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mfid0 bs=16384 count=16 (mfid0 in my case)
Then, simple enough:
gpt create /dev/mfid0
gpt add /dev/mfid0 and finally just newfs -U /dev/mfid0p1

-Patrik