How do I create large partitions in FreeBSD?

[Maxim Khitrov]

On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 2:24 PM, Peter Steele <psteele at maxiscale.com> wrote:
>>You cannot use fdisk for this, because fdisk creates MBR partition tables and these partitions are limited to 2 TB. You have three
>>options:
>>
>>1. Use GPT instead of MBR. This is handled by gpt (FreeBSD 7) and gpart (FreeBSD 8) commands.
>
> We're running 8.0. I'll have to check out gpart.
>
>>2. Use a "dangerously dedicated" partitioning scheme.
>>3. Bypass all partitioning issues and do what Polytropon suggested.
>>
>>The third option will only work if you don't need to boot from the array and are happy with a single 11TB file system.
>
> We do need to boot from these drives so this is not an option.
>
>> The second option gives you partitions and the ability to boot FreeBSD, but no other operating system will recognize the array.
>>Device names will be da1a, da1b, etc. To do this run the following
>>commands:
>>
>>bsdlabel -w -B da1
>
> When I run this command I get:
>
> # bsdlabel -w -B da1
> bsdlabel: disks with more than 2^32-1 sectors are not supported

I forgot about that one, sorry.

> So that seems we are limited to option 1. We didn't anticipate this; hope there aren't unexpected gotchas lurking around the corner...

Not sure if you're able to do this, but I would advise you against
using the same array for OS, swap, and data. For all the servers I've
configured, I always use a two small (32-64 GB) drives in RAID 1
configuration for the first two functions. The data is always on a
physically-separate array, which means that I'm free to use newfs on
the entire thing and never have to deal with partitions.

This setup is simpler, safer, and faster since your data drives are
now performing just one function.

- Max