Today's Esoteric Linux Discovery

[fivemack]

If you try to install SuSE Enterprise Linux 10.2 on a device of more than 2TB in size (eg the /dev/sda presented by a hardware RAID), it fails at the stage of installing GRUB.

This is because devices larger than 2TB have to use the 'GPT' format for their partition table, rather than the msdos format, because the msdos format uses 32-bit sector counts for addresses and sizes of partitions, and 2^32 sectors is 2TB. And GRUB as distributed by SLES doesn't understand GPT.

mjg59 pointed out that the answer is to use LILO, which has a very basic understanding of the disc, so loads the initial kernel and initrd from a list of sector numbers produced by the /sbin/lilo program without even trying to understand the partition table. On the 6TB server at work, this so far appears to work.

The alternative is to use GRUB and have /boot on a USB stick.

Comments

[hatam-soferet.livejournal.com]

There are a few people on my flist who make posts where I coulda sworn I understood most of the words, taken individually, but put them all together and suddenly it's all foreign, and one's forced to float along in happy incomprehension. It's rather nice, in a way. :)

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, I should have put that in my 'geek' filter.

I have a habit of, after fiddling around for ages to discover the solution to some badly-documented problem, writing down the solution somewhere where other people with the same problem might find it through google; and LJ works as well as other places for that. So it's a message partly to myself and partly to the world, and understandably it may confuse my friendslist.

[hatam-soferet.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I should've been more emphatic: it's cute and awesome and I like it very much.

[crazyscot.livejournal.com]

s/a USB stick/some other device/ (another hard drive? floppy? CDROM?)

[emperor]

Is there no version of GRUB that supports GPT? Could you not use that?