Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:11:35 +0200 From: Ivan Voras <ivoras@freebsd.org> To: George Mamalakis <mamalos@eng.auth.gr> Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD 8.0-BETA4 IBM ServerRaid 8k issues Message-ID: <9bbcef730909101111l2d3a4e31y4710175e19e3f870@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <4AA92EF1.6010804@eng.auth.gr> References: <4AA90D88.4010004@eng.auth.gr> <h8b3p3$h2t$1@ger.gmane.org> <4AA92EF1.6010804@eng.auth.gr>
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2009/9/10 George Mamalakis <mamalos@eng.auth.gr>: > Thank you for your answer again, and (now that you mentioned it:) ) in case > anyone knows whether we'll be able to see partitions > 2T in the future (or > now?!), please say how :). Actually, FreeBSD can use arbitrary sized drives and partitions (64-bit) but it's only the default partition scheme (bsdlabel) that doesn't support it. Since bsdlabel is used by the default installer (sysinstall), it means you can't install FreeBSD on such a setup, which is recognized to be a Bad Thing. The solution is to use a modern partitioning scheme like GPT (which has 64-bit limits) and then: a) partition the drive/array from a Live CD and do a manual install of FreeBSD from the installer CDs - which isn't as hard as it sounds, since it involves basically two steps: installing the boot loaders and unpacking the files or b) install on a smaller drive (or volume if your controller supports creating arbitrary volumes / partitions on top of RAID topology) and use this drive/volume for the OS, and then partition and use the larger array/volume for data. In either case, once you manually partition the drive/volume with GPT, you will encounter no further size limits. A really kludgy workaround, which I don't think you should use, is to create two partitions (I don't know if you could create more than two 2 TB partitions) and then use gconcat to concatenate them into a bigger "JBOD-style" software RAID device.
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