twe driver, 1+ terabyte array, fdisk and disklabel

Mark Nipper nipsy at tamu.edu
Wed Aug 13 14:55:21 PDT 2003


	So I'm having some problems with 5.1-RELEASE.  I'm not
sure if these have already been addressed but as I have found no
mention of any of these problems on the mailing lists (web
searchable anyway) or deja and google, I've subscribed myself to
current and am looking for possible answers.  :)

	I have a 3ware 7500-8.  I also have 8 Western Digital
"Special Edition" 250GB drives attached to said RAID card.  I
currently have one RAID-5 array configured for a total of 1.75T.
There seem to be no real issues on the hardware side of this
equation.

	I just grabbed the 5.1-RELEASE ISO and tried to install.
No dice, although I have had mixed results.

	The disk geometry as reported (guessed actually, as it
tells me the geometry reported by BIOS is obviously wrong and
continues to remind me it's guessing every single time I move
lines) in fdisk is 212808/255/63, for a grand total of 3418760520
sectors (again, as reported by fdisk).  If I, at this point, say
"use entire disk" it gives me roughly:
---
offset     size(st)   end        name    ftype desc    subtype flags
0          63         62         -       12    unused  0
63         3418760457 3418760519 twed0s1 8     freebsd 165
-876206776 4536       3418765055 -       12    unused  0

	Obvious problems there.  And also, why do there appear to
be more sectors listed here than in the sectors reported at the
top of the screen (3418765055 versus 3418760520)?  And the
negative offset.  Riiight...  :)

	So then I try to do dangerously dedicated mode.  I
eventually give up on the CLI and switch to wizard mode.  I'm
finally able to make it dedicated.  So now I have:
---
offset     size(st)   end        name    ftype desc    subtype flags
0          3418765056 3418765055 twed0s1 8     freebsd 165

	Yay.  Now on to disklabel, right?  Well, at this point,
regardless of whether my fdisk looks like example 1 above or
example 2, I get this in disklabel:
---
Fatal Error: Partitions are larger than actual chunk?? - PRESS ANY KEY TO REBOOT

	Haha.  There are only two ways I've found to make this
work so far, and I'm not happy with either really.  One is
simple.  Use RAID-10, and my disk array drops to 1T.  Fast, but
not what I'm looking for.  The second is to use "create slice" in
fdisk, and it puts the default number of 3.4 billion sectors in
the field for the size of the slice I want to create.  When I hit
enter, it actually only ends up using 2 billion some odd sectors,
and then I can create a second slice of the remaining drive.  At
that point, disklabel at least runs without dying right away, but
then I have an approximately 1T slice followed by a 600 something
gigabyte slice.  Again, not what I'm looking for.

	Any advice?  Are the disk tools just not 64 bit clean or
something?  Or is this a kernel, device driver or fs layer
problem?

-- 
Mark Nipper                                                e-contacts:
Computing and Information Services                      nipsy at tamu.edu
Texas A&M University                        http://ops.tamu.edu/nipsy/
College Station, TX 77843-3142     AIM/Yahoo: texasnipsy ICQ: 66971617
(979)575-3193                                      MSN: nipsy at tamu.edu

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