Greater than 2TB disks bootable?

Roger Heflin rogerheflin at gmail.com
Wed Oct 1 01:24:17 UTC 2008


Phil Meyer wrote:
> 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?

fdisk has issues with > 2TB.

> 
> 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.

If it is a hardware raid controller it is generally possible to "partition" it 
in the hardware raid controller (either separate the big r5 into 2, or define 2 
separate raid's over the same disks with one only taking up a small part of 
everything) to setup the boot device <2TB.  I have done this before with 3ware 
and Areca controllers, and would bet almost all of the raid controllers have 
this ability.

Check the manual for the raid controller, it may or may not be able to do it.

                          Roger




More information about the fedora-list mailing list