Install onto 6Tb array

[Barry Pederson]

LI Xin wrote:
> Lawrence Farr wrote:
>> I'd like to install stable directly onto a 6Tb Areca array, and
>> have run out of clues how to do it. In the past I've always
>> used a separate boot volume that was small enough for sysinstall
>> to work with, but I have no space to fit more drives in this
>> chassis. I've tried putting a small partition on the start,
>> which boots fine, but screws up the disk sizing as the geometry
>> is wrong I guess? tried diskprep, but that gets the gemometry
>> wrong as well. Is the only option to use gpt and restore to
>> it from another boot device and hope that the bios can boot it? 
> 
> I am afraid so...  6TB is way too large for MBR to manage (which can
> support 4TB at maximum).

I've got a server with an Areca in it, and found it works fairly well to divide 
the "raid set" into a small "volume set" for booting and use the remainder as 
another volume set for data.

The BIOS and OS see the volume sets as separate drives, so the one you're 
booting off of can be a reasonable size that the MBR can handle, and sliced and 
partitioned normally.   The data "volume set" I just newfs-ed raw (no slices or 
partitions).

	Barry