CentOS - Feb 2007 - LVM on large partitions greater than 2TB

I want to create one large LVM volume on the 2.5TB device.  I seem to be
able to create an LVM physical volume on the whole device, but I've read
that it's better to create a single large partition for LVM as the existence
of the partition informs other apps that the disk is in use which prevents
accidental corruption of the LVM volume.

Creating a large partition of this size under Centos is proving to be
surprisingly difficult.  I am unable to get fdisk to see more that 513GB on
the whole unit, and once I create one 513GB partition, I can't create any
additional partitions ("no sectors available").  I've read that
fdisk has
trouble with large partitions and that the GNU parted program should be used
instead.  Problem here is that GNU parted doesn't know about many file
systems and doesn't know anything about LVM.  So, following some steps on
the LVM Howto, I used parted to create a large ext2 partition, then used
fdisk to change the type to 8e for LVM.  Once I do this, I see that the
partition is now 2TB in size -- close, but .5 TB short.

Why is this so difficult?  How should large partitions be created under
Centos?

Any help is appreciated.

Tom
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Once upon a time Sunday 04 February 2007 10:04 pm, t m
wrote:
> I want to create one large LVM volume on the 2.5TB device.  I seem to be
> able to create an LVM physical volume on the whole device, but I've
read
> that it's better to create a single large partition for LVM as the
> existence of the partition informs other apps that the disk is in use which
> prevents accidental corruption of the LVM volume.
> Why is this so difficult?  How should large partitions be created under
> Centos?
msdos disk labels are capable of supporting only 2tb  so you need to use gpt 
or split your disks up in 2tb chunks.  parted will let you create what you 
need as far as got labels goes .

One big issue to note is that you can not boot from a disk labeled with gpt 
labels.

Dennis