3Ware 9650SE with 4 disk array

[Doug Sampson]

> Hi,
> 
> We've received a server containing 3Ware 9650SE controller 
> with 4 ports and
> it comes with 4 WD7500AYYS drives with the following drive 
> parameters of LBA
> 1465149168 (sectors?). I'm using FBSD 7.0 RC-1 which provides 
> the necessary
> drivers for that controller card. The array is created using RAID5.
> 
> The problem arises when I fdisk the drive array. The 
> sysinstall installation
> routine complains that the  drive parameters provided by the BIOS is
> incorrect. When I ask to see the drive info using fdisk, I am 
> given the
> following information:
> 
> # fdisk
> parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
> cylinders=273542 heads=255 sectors/tracks=63 (16065 blks/cyl)
> 
> Media sector size is 512
> Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1
> Information from BIOS bootblock is:
> The data for partition 1 is:
> sysid 165 (0xa5),(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD)
>    start 63, size 88484871 (48576 Meg), flag 80 (active)
>       beg:  cyl 0/ head 1/ sector 1;
>       end:  cyl 1023/ head 165/ sector 59
> The data for partition 2 is:
> <UNUSED>
> The data for partition 3 is:
> <UNUSED>
> The data for partition 4 is:
> <UNUSED>
> #
> 
> I see that when I am finished setting up the drive array, I 
> am getting a
> much smaller use of the entire array. Using the "Auto Defaults" option
> inside bsdlabel, I end up with /dev/da0s1f (/usr) in the 
> range of 40 GB. I
> should be seeing something in the order of 2 TB.
> 
> I've tried fdisking and bsdlabeling for 2 Tb to no avail 
> several times.
> 
> What am I doing wrong?
> 

Turns out the disk array had a partition set up for 2048 GB which FBSD 7.0
RC-1 doesn't support. Auto-carving the array to 2047 GB did the trick.