HP ML350 G5 RAID5 and freeBSD 7

[Martin Badie]

Hi,

Here are my findings about this issue:

1) ML350 G5 uses PC BIOS not EFI Bios so **hardware** doesn't allow to boot from disks > 2 TB (

http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=14271)
2) cciss driver with freebsd 7 and freebsd 6.3 can't see virtual disks larger that 2 TB you must use http://yogurt.org/FreeBSD/ciss_large.diff patch to see vdisk > 2TB

3) Your / must be in vdisk < 2TB

So here is my solution: (for freebsd 6.3 and 7.0)

1) Use 2 RAID on E200i first is RAID0 (that has size less than 2 TB) and create another RAID as RAID5 
2) After installation you will not see second raid5 on freebsd 6.3 and 7.0. You will see following errors on dmesg output:

(da1:ciss0:0:1:0): got CAM status 0x4 
(da1:ciss0:0:1:0): fatal error, failed to attach to device 
(da1:ciss0:0:1:0): lost device 
(da1:ciss0:0:1:0): removing device entry 

3) Compile a kernel with that patch (http://yogurt.org/FreeBSD/ciss_large.diff ) and reboot

4) After rebooting in to new patched kernel you can see RAID5 (>2TB) 
5) Format RAID5 with using GPT as follows:

# gpt show /dev/da1 

# gpt create -f /dev/da1 

# gpt add /dev/da1 

# gpt show /dev/da1 

# newfs /dev/da1p1 


That's it..

PS: I have used 7.1 BETA2 and saw that it can see whole disks ( > 2 TB) with sysinstall but since ML350 G5 doesn't support EFI boot (hardware) we can't boot it after installation.

And here is my question "Does sysinstall support GPT instead of PC BIOS on installation?" That I don't know..



Regards.