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Bug#642179: debian-installer: Installs on drives larger than 2.19TB fails with older bios



On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 08:08:28PM -0500, Karl Schmidt wrote:
> Package: debian-installer
> Version: 20110106+squeeze3
> Severity: normal
> Tags: d-i squeeze
> 
> 
> 
> -- System Information:
> Debian Release: 6.0.2
>   APT prefers stable
>   APT policy: (990, 'stable'), (500, 'stable-updates')
> Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
> 
> Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
> Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
> Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
> 
> 
> Install attempts on a Tyan S7002 failed with a drive larger than 2.19TB (would fail at the grub installation)
> 
> I was able to move an install to a 1TB drive then move to a larger disk - grow the partition, but on a kernel update it would no longer boot.
> 
> This might have to do with the 2.19TB limitation of MBR - which means a move to GUID Partition Table (GPT) and possibly the need for 
> a BIOS's that supports GUID. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table )
> 
> In the mean time Debian installer fails to give any warning about larger drives and fdisk/sfdisk also fail to warn.
> 
> 
> The current kernels support GPT, but it is less than clear how older bios interact. It might be that just the boot disk 
> needs to be smaller than 2.19TB and that storage disks formatted with GPT will work fine on machines with BIOS's that don't support GPT? 
> It is also possible that fdisk/cfdisk/sfdisk are failing without warning if one tries to use these large drives.
> 
> gparted supports EFI/GPT.
> 
> I'm thinking that D-i needs to detect the large drive size, possible the ability of the bios to work with this drive size and give a warning.
> 
> There might be problems supporting 2TB drives with the partioner in D-I that is independent to the BIOS. Sadly I have more questions than 
> answers and hope someone with a better understanding of this issue writes it up.

I installed on a 2.25TB disk (hardware raid 5) a few years ago, and the
only thing I had to do was use grub 2 rather than grub 0.97, and install
grub to the MBR.  The installer used GPT automatically, which worked fine.
And of course I made a small partition at the start to use for the boot
files, so that grub and the bios wouldn't be trying to access anything
way beyond where the bios might like to go.

So in my case:

(parted) print                                                            
Model: ServeRA MAIN (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 2250GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name  Flags
 1      17.4kB  50.0GB  50.0GB  ext3         Root  boot 
 2      50.0GB  2250GB  2200GB               LVM   lvm

So I have boot and root and such as a 50G partition at the start,
and everything else is LVM.  Never had a problem.

The BIOS certainly has no clue about GPT, but grub2 does, and as long
as grub is installed to the MBR that does the trick it seems.

-- 
Len Sorensen



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