Booting GPT

I’m installing new 4TB disks on an older Dell server, it’s a PowerEdge T110 with a G6950 CPU so it’s not really old, but it’s a couple of generations behind the latest Dell servers.

I tried to enable UEFI booting, but when I turned that option on the system locked up during the BIOS process (wouldn’t boot from the CD or take keyboard input). So I had to make it boot with a BIOS compatible MBR and a GPT partition table.

Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size      Code  Name
  1            2048            4095  1024.0 KiB  EF02  BIOS boot partition
  2            4096        25169919  12.0 GiB    FD00  Linux RAID
  3        25169920      7814037134  3.6 TiB    8300  Linux filesystem

After spending way to much time reading various web pages I discovered that the above partition table works. The 1MB partition is for GRUB code and needs to be enabled by a parted command such as the following:

parted /dev/sda set 1 bios_grub on

/dev/sda2 is a RAID-1 array used for the root filesystem. If I was installing a non-RAID system I’d use the same partition table but with a type of 8300 instead of FD00. I have a RAID-1 array over sda2 and sdb2 for the root filesystem and sda3, sdb3, sdc3, sdd3, and sde3 are used for a RAID-Z array. I’m reserving space for the root filesystem on all 5 disks because it seems like a good idea to use the same partition table and the 12G per disk that is unused on sdc, sdd, and sde isn’t worth worrying about when dealing with 4TB disks.

Syndicated 2014-08-06 06:53:34 from etbe - Russell Coker