2.4TB disk - MBR and GPT coexist?
Jo Rhett
jrhett at svcolo.com
Thu Jan 11 21:56:50 UTC 2007
Thanks for the reply. The problem is that I have a single 6-drive
(550gb/ea) RAID-5 array. If I split two disks off to make a RAID-1
boot device, I'll lose 1TB of usable storage.
I just found the "auto carving" feature of the 3ware controller, and
we'll see how that works for my needs.
Someone really needs to keep an up to date page of what options are
available. There's a lot of talk about GEOM on slice 2 and GPT in
the GEOM, but I couldn't figure out how to make slice2 be 2TB. I
could talk sysinstall into doing it, but rebooting just gave me
"Invalid partition table" :-(
Since we're going to be stuck with old BIOSes for a long time after
2TB is a cheap disk drive at [store], is anyone considering doing the
work to make GPT co-exist with an MBR block? It seems like the
obvious and sensible choice. You boot from the MBR partition, and
then load the GPT module and access the remaining data after that...
On Jan 11, 2007, at 1:34 PM, Nikolay Pavlov wrote:
> You need to create to RAID arrays as separate devices, for example
> in my case (ARECA raid) it would be da0 and da1.
> On the first da0 drive install MBR with fdisk and labels as usual,
> but on
> second da1 install GPT with gpt utility (man gpt)
>
> gpt create -f /dev/da1
> gpt add -t ufs /dev/da1
>
> Skeep disklabel procedure and format /dev/da1p1 with newfs utility
> like
> this:
>
> newfs /dev/da1p1
> mount -t ufs /dev/da1p1 /mnt/mnt2
>
> Thats it.
>
> /dev/da1p1 4.3T 26G 4.3T 1% /mnt/mnt2
>
>>
>> Sorry for the rookie questions, but I've done dozens of searches and
>> there's lots of discussion of the issues but no real obvious
>> solutions.
>>
>> On Jan 11, 2007, at 1:04 AM, Jo Rhett wrote:
>>> So I have a raid array of 2.4TB. And yes, I really need 2.4TB, and
>>> no there's no room for another set of disks to boot from.
>>> / 1g
>>> /var 16g
>>> /big **everything else
>>>
>>> Sysinstall recognized the drive properly and everything looked
>>> dandy during install. However, it turns out that fdisk and
>>> bsdlabel both just chopped off the last partition at 248GB. (why
>>> 248gb and not 2tb?)
>>>
>>> Reading the various mailing lists, it strikes me that I need to
>>> make partition 1 be normal MBR, and then use GPT to create another
>>> partition table in slice 2. Makes sense to me.
>>>
>>> How? In theory this seems simple, but I can't figure out how to
>>> modify the slices without fdisk, which won't play ball with the
>>> larger size.
>>>
>>> And why 248GB anyway? I'd almost be willing to lose the extra .4tb
>>> if it just stopped at 2TB. Why does it slap back down to 248gb?
>>>
>>> NOTE: yes I already understand about PC BIOS and MBR, and not
>>> reading GPT format. The question is -- how do I make them coexist?
>>>
>>> --
>>> Jo Rhett
>>> senior geek
>>> Silicon Valley Colocation
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> freebsd-stable at freebsd.org mailing list
>>> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable
>>> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-stable-
>>> unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>>
>> --
>> Jo Rhett
>> senior geek
>> Silicon Valley Colocation
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> freebsd-stable at freebsd.org mailing list
>> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable
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>> unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>
> --
> ======================================================================
> - Best regards, Nikolay Pavlov. <<<-----------------------------------
> ======================================================================
>
--
Jo Rhett
senior geek
Silicon Valley Colocation
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