Greater than 2TB disks bootable?

Phil Meyer pmeyer at themeyerfarm.com
Mon Sep 29 20:16:25 UTC 2008


There is a lot of confusion available from articles on the Internet 
about whether or not a greater than 2TB disk can be made bootable in Linux.

In order to go that large, the disk must be labelled, via partd, as type 
GPT.

Ok so far.

Now, is it possible to use fdisk to cut off 100MB or so for a normal 
/boot partition?
It seems that labelling a disk as GPT does not stomp the MBR, but does 
affect the partition table.  Is this correct?

If I create a 100MB partition using fdisk, and then label the disk as 
GPT, can I start the large partition with the first cylinder > than what 
I cut off for /boot and expect it to be seen?

Anaconda complains that GPT is not bootable.  Is that system specific, 
BIOS specific, anaconda error reading the BIOS, ???

Here is the specific scenario:

An intel based server, with 10 1TB drives attached to a SATA RAID 
device.  The RAID is level 5 with 9 drives and a hot spare.

What the system sees, is one device of ~8TB.

Is it possible to boot from the device, AND have all but /boot as one 
large partition?

Thanks!




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