Hard Drive Size Limitation

[Shawn Tayler]

On Sun, 2009-07-12 at 19:56 +0800, Yu Meng Chong wrote:
> ----- "Shawn Tayler" <stayler at xmtservices.net> wrote:
> 
> > I was running out of space oa database server partition and had
> > purchased 6 new 600G SAS drives to replace the 4 300G drive that were
> > originally installed.  The server is a Dell Poweredge 2950 with
> > aPerc5
> > SAS RAID  Controller, 2 2GHz Quad Core CPUs and 32G of RAM.
> > 
> > Anyway, I used the controller to put the 6 new drives into one RAID 5
> > Virtual Disk of about 2.8 TB.
> 
> Hi Shawn,
> 
> RAID on Dell is always tricky, whether you know the technology or not.
> 
> For some Dell RAID controllers, the RAID array needs to be setup on boot, that is, there is a hot-key combination to bring up the RAID configuration when you boot up. I have, however, come across one particular type of Dell RAID where you setup the RAID array inside the BIOS configuration (!). 
> 
> The problem you are seeing seems to be related to the Dell RAID setup rather than Slackware's kernel being unable to support large disks. 
> 
> Did you setup the RAID-5 array at boot, or are you using software RAID?
> 
> Regards,
> pascal chong
> 

Thanks for the info Pascal!

I was finally able to figure out what was happening.

The RAID was actually fine, the issue was with Slackware 12.2.  There
must be some sort of limitation in the 2.6.27 kernel or the utils
included in the distro.  As an experiment I booted the machine with a
copy of Ubuntu 64bit Server 9.04 and viola!  No problem partitioning and
installing the OS, although I would not recommend the built in
Postgresql server package seriously FUBAR'd.  I built 8.2.13 from source
after I had everything else up.  Even after I had finished the install
and it was working, I tried to boot with Slack and it still could not
make sense of the RAID drive.  So I am now running on Ubuntu.  I know,
its not my first choice, but it just worked and sometimes that's what
you really need.

Comments or discussion welcome.

Shawn