On 02/13/2012 08:18 AM, Greg Freemyer wrote:
On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 11:12 AM, James Knott
wrote: I thought the OP mentioned "drives", not a single drive. If so, then RAID is a possibility, with LVM on the RAID array. The OP said 3TB drives. As long as 3TB physical drives are involved, you have to address the GPT issue(s).
The current Windows solution I believe is to only support GPT on data drives, not boot drives. I believe opensuse supports that relatively easily as well.
It is when you want to boot off of 3TB drives you have problems.
Here's my recent experience. I established a new account with a hosting provider that included a single 3-TB disk option. While I usually install openSuSE via KVM over IP, in this case the technicians on-site made the 12.1 install for me. The install went well, or so they thought, until first boot. I asked them to partition the drive thusly. I forgot about the big-disk issue. GNU Parted 2.4 Using /dev/sda Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands. (parted) p Model: ATA WDC WD30EZRS-00J (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 3001GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B Partition Table: gpt_sync_mbr Number Start End Size File system Name Flags 1 1049kB 206MB 204MB ext2 primary boot 2 206MB 312MB 107MB ext2 primary 3 312MB 11.0GB 10.7GB linux-swap(v1) primary 4 11.0GB 54.0GB 43.0GB xfs primary 5 54.0GB 97.0GB 43.0GB xfs primary 6 97.0GB 3001GB 2904GB xfs primary (I like to have two boot and root partitions to allow easy upgrades) Note that fdisk reports: Disk /dev/sda: 3000.6 GB, 3000592982016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 364801 cylinders, total 5860533168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 2048 401407 199680 83 Linux /dev/sda2 401408 610303 104448 83 Linux /dev/sda3 610304 21575679 10482688 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda4 1 1 0+ ee GPT Partition 4 does not start on physical sector boundary. Partition table entries are not in disk order Since I don't have physical access to the box the guys at the NOC worked on the issue. I gave them a link showing how to patch old-grub to support large disks, but they didn't need it. One of the guys discovered that the motherboard allows selection of EFT as a BIOS boot option. Enabling that one mobo option allowed the box to boot. I don't know how this will affect my next upgrade, but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. Regards, Lew -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org