On 7/26/07, Mark Stodola <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> You may need to pre-partition the drive if the SL installer cannot handle it.

I think the trouble was this:  grub's stage1 detected a problem, in
that the PC BIOS didn't support booting from such a disk > 2TB.

Now, its error handling could have been more clear, but even if I had
managed to get grub onto it, the PC wouldn't have been able to boot
from it.

That's why the RAID card allows you to create one RAID5 array that the
BIOS sees as two disks.  That way, you can put the OS on a smaller
disk, without dedicating an entire drive to it.


> One difference with my setup is that I use a standalone 250GB drive for the OS.  I've never liked the idea of booting from a raid, although I do it standard for customers in a raid 1 configuration with 2x250GB drives on SL 4.1.

That wasn't an option here.  Our box could hold exactly 4 drives, and
thats what we needed in the array.


> This is the first I've heard of 50GB < X < 2045GB causing problems.  Boot loaders, specifically LILO, had trouble in the past with booting from a partition beyond the 1024th cylinder, but that has long since been remedied.

So really, its devices greater than 2^32 x 512 == 2TB which the BIOS,
not the boot loader, freaks out on.  The OS itself doesn't have a
problem with it.