nobaloney
NoBaloney Internet Svcs - In Memoriam †
Interesting problem with 2TB drives on Red Hat and Derivatives:
Our first try at building a system wth multiple 2TB drives in a hardware RAID array it worked fine. We used brand new drives, never before installed anywhere.
The second time, without hardware RAID (using software for per-partition flexibility, we got an interesting error:
Though these drives reported exactly 2TB, this might have been the problem. So we tried the install on Scientific Linux6 (this is a backup server and won't be running DirectAdmin), This gave us a different error:
The newer Kernel is supposed to work fine with larger drives, but appears to protect you from writing over one drive in a RAID array. We couldn't use the drives; they weren't recognized in the system.
We eventually found a fix that seems to work (and possibly cure both problems): We zeroed out each drive. While we used a bios-based drive format program, most searches found with Google recommend using the dd command.
Don't ask. Over seven hours per drive.
But then we were able to install Scientific Linux 6. Not tried with CentOS 5, but we think it will probably work; after all the first machine worked with 2TB drives with drives that were unused to start.
Jeff
Our first try at building a system wth multiple 2TB drives in a hardware RAID array it worked fine. We used brand new drives, never before installed anywhere.
The second time, without hardware RAID (using software for per-partition flexibility, we got an interesting error:
Googling finds that drives larger than 2TB can't be formatted on CentOS5.x and below.this machine cannot boot using GPT
Though these drives reported exactly 2TB, this might have been the problem. So we tried the install on Scientific Linux6 (this is a backup server and won't be running DirectAdmin), This gave us a different error:
Raid metadata detected
The newer Kernel is supposed to work fine with larger drives, but appears to protect you from writing over one drive in a RAID array. We couldn't use the drives; they weren't recognized in the system.
We eventually found a fix that seems to work (and possibly cure both problems): We zeroed out each drive. While we used a bios-based drive format program, most searches found with Google recommend using the dd command.
Don't ask. Over seven hours per drive.
But then we were able to install Scientific Linux 6. Not tried with CentOS 5, but we think it will probably work; after all the first machine worked with 2TB drives with drives that were unused to start.
Jeff