Today's Esoteric Linux Discovery
Sep. 24th, 2008 11:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fivemackIf 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.
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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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2008-09-26 12:49 am (UTC)