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majoron
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PostPosted: Wed Jun 18, 2008 5:42 pm    Post subject: [solved] maximum partition size Reply with quote

Hi,
I've just set up a raid (raid5) having 4TB of total capacity and wanted to make a partition with this size.
When I use fdisk or cfdisk to make the partition, they both tell me that the disk is 4TB big, but they allow only about 2TB in one partition.
I have checked that I have "Support for Large Block Devices" enabled in the kernel, so in principle I'd be able to have a disk device with size bigger than 2TB.
What am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance.
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Last edited by majoron on Thu Jun 19, 2008 12:12 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Berticus
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PostPosted: Wed Jun 18, 2008 6:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Use parted instead: http://www.unixgods.org/~tilo/linux_larger_2TB.html
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frostschutz
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PostPosted: Wed Jun 18, 2008 6:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

If you want the whole thing to be one partition, you can just mkfs the device directly, no need to actually partition it.
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tgR10
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PostPosted: Wed Jun 18, 2008 8:13 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

sudo su
cd /usr/src/linux && make menuconfig
--- Enable the block layer --->
[*] Support for Large Block Devices
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manaka
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PostPosted: Wed Jun 18, 2008 8:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The standard msdos partition table has a 2 TB limit... You need to use another format like GPT that doesn't have this limit...

parted is able to handle GPT... You also need a kernel supporting GPT (CONFIG_EFI_PARTITION).

As for GRUB, latest versions in Portage include a patch to make it able to handle GPT...
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majoron
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 19, 2008 12:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks a lot to everyone for sharing his/her wisdom.
Quote:
sudo su
cd /usr/src/linux && make menuconfig
--- Enable the block layer --->
[*] Support for Large Block Devices

As you can see my first post says that this was already enabled.

Quote:
Use parted instead: http://www.unixgods.org/~tilo/linux_larger_2TB.html

I didn't mention it, but I also (naively) tried it with parted. I didn't get it. However manaka gave me the key:
Quote:
The standard msdos partition table has a 2 TB limit... You need to use another format like GPT that doesn't have this limit...

parted is able to handle GPT... You also need a kernel supporting GPT (CONFIG_EFI_PARTITION).

As for GRUB, latest versions in Portage include a patch to make it able to handle GPT...

I didn't find this option in the kernel, but fortunately it wasn't necessary to tune the kernel (whatever option is needed was already selected); moreover the disk is going to be used as data disk, so there are no need of boot loaders tricks.
So I started parted and before making the partition with "mkpart" I did the following:
Code:
mklabel gpt

And "mkpart" works now with the whole disk. Gracias manaka :wink:
(Just as an informative note: according to wikipedia, in order to have more than 2TiB with ext3 one has to select a block size bigger or equal than 2KiB, and that's what I did)

Quote:
If you want the whole thing to be one partition, you can just mkfs the device directly, no need to actually partition it.

Thanks; it looks also promising, but it was my "b" plan. As parted worked fine there was no need of anything else.

Best regards.
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