Re: Debian installer with RAID of 6TB
Chris Moules <christopher@gms.lu> writes:
> OK, I have done a reinstall this morning and managed to resolve the issue.
>
> Before running the Debian Lenny installer, I booted to a rescue console and
> did a "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1MB count=250" to erase the first part
> of the disk. After this, everything seemed to run OK. I was able to use the
> full 6TB.
>
> The cause of the initial problem:
> I have previously been testing the array in a RAID 10. This is then 4TB of
> space. I believe that the previous GPT partition table was read and some
> constraints of this were used.
>
> One question remains, which is 'is there a bug'? If the system is picking up
> 'old' configuration data that does not fit to the current environment is this
> correct? Should the system propose to generate a new partition table? Even
> with the above 'dd' after I created the same 256MB boot partition and setup a
> new LVM partition, the LVM manager picked up the 'existing' LVM config on disk
> even though there was a new partition table etc.
I would say that you did not create a new partition table last time. You
only created new partitions in the existing old and 4TB table.
> I can see the advantages of the system automatically using existing
> data that it finds, however I am not able to perform a 'clean' setup
> if partman finds anything on the disk that matches some previous
> configuration.
Partman should at least not automatically change the existing data. But
there should be the equivalent of "cfdisk -z" to start with a totaly
fresh empty table for several reasons.
One of them being that the disk size might have changed in a raid setup.
The other is that the disk might be prepartitioned with bad
alignment. Newer parted alignes the first partition at 1MB or so while
old layout started at 32.5k. And guess how nice that plays with disks
that have 4k blocks internally.
> I guess that there is no 4TB bug and that this was simply to do with a re-usage of
> the old GPT that was limited to 4TB.
Please file a bug though about the fact you couldn't resize it
later. Parted should really know how to grow the partition and call
pvresize.
> Thanks for your input and time.
>
> Regards
>
> Chris
MfG
Goswin
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