raid6 on freebsd7 only showing 61GB instead of 4TB

[Pieter de Goeje]

On Thursday 15 May 2008, Oliver Howe wrote:
> I bought a new storage server and installed freebsd7 onto it. it came with
> two raid partitions, one of 32GB which i used for the o/s and one of 4.7TB
> which i am planning to use as a nfs partition. everything went fine during
> the install, fdisk said that there was 4.7TB on the second partition which
> i labelled "/export". but when the machine booted up and i did df -h it
> said that that partition only has 61GB and not 4.7TB
>
> $ uname -a
> FreeBSD pmstorage3.uk1.bibliotech.net 7.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE #0:
> Sun Feb 24 19:59:52 UTC 2008    
> root at logan.cse.buffalo.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  i386 $
>
> $ df -h
> Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
> /dev/da0s1a    496M    128M    328M    28%    /
> devfs          1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
> /dev/da1s1d     61G    4.0K     56G     0%    /export
> /dev/da0s1e    496M     12K    456M     0%    /tmp
> /dev/da0s1f     22G    515M     20G     2%    /usr
> /dev/da0s1d    4.1G    1.3M    3.8G     0%    /var
> $
>
>
> server details are
>
> CyberServe 38512
> 3U  Chassis 16 x Hot Swap HDD, 5.25 Slim line CD, FDD Redundant 700 Watt
> PSU X7 DBE Main Board
> 1 x 5420 2.5GHz Intel Xeon Low power Processor 2 x 6Mb  1333 FSB
> 16 GB DDR Memory ( Low Powered Ram)
> 3 Ware 16 Port Hardware RAID Controller, 0,1,0+1,5,50 & 6
> 16 x WD 500 Gb SATA HDDs Green Drives (Raid 6 System Drives Total Usable
> Volume size 4.79 TB ) 2xGbE LAN ports,
>
>
>
> does anyone know why this is?
>
>
> thanks,
>
> oliver

You cannot use fdisk slices ("partitions") with disks over 2TB. Use of GPT is 
recommended. See gpt(8) and:

http://www.freebsd.org/projects/bigdisk/index.html

Another way would be to simply newfs/mount /dev/ad1 instead (without 
partitioning).

-- 
Pieter de Goeje