[CentOS] Formatting a large disk

Bart Schaefer
Sun, 23 Sep 2007 18:28:42 -0000

On 9/23/07, Rajeev R Veedu <rajeev at cracknell.com>
wrote:
>
> I need to install Centos on a machine with 3tb raid disk. (3 ware raid
card)
> Could someone in the list suggest a utility for partition this disk.

We recently installed CentOS 5 on a pair of machines with 2.5TB RAIDs
and the only way we could get it to work was to use LVM on the raw
disk. I didn't do it myself so I don't recall all the details, but the
gist of it was that in any other partition the tools would not
increase the block size above 512, so it was not possible to allocate
enough cylinders to fill the disk.  (The size could be set to > 512
but then when the partition was created it always ignored the setting
and used 512, or something to that effect.)

fdisk -l output:

Disk /dev/sdc: 2494.9 GB, 2494992220160 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 151666 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 1024 = 16450560 bytes

Disk /dev/sdc doesn't contain a valid partition table

I don't know whether gparted would have enabled some different magic,
I'm not sure anyone here tried using it.