From owner-freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG Fri May 25 00:44:52 2007 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [69.147.83.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E165116A469 for ; Fri, 25 May 2007 00:44:52 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from janm@transactionware.com) Received: from mail.transactionware.com (mail.transactionware.com [203.14.245.7]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 464EE13C483 for ; Fri, 25 May 2007 00:44:52 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from janm@transactionware.com) Received: (qmail 69371 invoked from network); 25 May 2007 00:18:30 -0000 Received: from midgard.transactionware.com (192.168.1.55) by dm.transactionware.com with SMTP; 25 May 2007 00:18:30 -0000 Received: (qmail 91291 invoked by uid 907); 25 May 2007 00:18:09 -0000 Received: from [192.168.1.51] (HELO janmxp) (192.168.1.51) by midgard.transactionware.com (qpsmtpd/0.32) with ESMTP; Fri, 25 May 2007 10:18:09 +1000 From: "Jan Mikkelsen" To: "'Richard Noorlandt'" , References: <99c92b5f0705240730o146c1bb4x326591687e445cd@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <99c92b5f0705240730o146c1bb4x326591687e445cd@mail.gmail.com> Date: Fri, 25 May 2007 10:18:09 +1000 Organization: Transactionware Message-ID: <000701c79e62$2c9c4190$85d4c4b0$@com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook 12.0 Thread-Index: AceeFJuTTmzGjD7bQteNMkKjjGFHBwATGrMg Content-Language: en-au Cc: Subject: RE: Growing UFS beyond 2 TB X-BeenThere: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Filesystems List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 25 May 2007 00:44:53 -0000 Richard Noorlandt wrote: > I'm currently configuring a large fileserver (Dual Opteron and > an Areca 1160 > for hardware RAID), and I'm running into some partitioning > problems. > Currently, I have 6 500 GB drives to put in a main RAID-6 > array, giving me 2 > TB of usable storage. Now, I want this 2 TB to be partitioned > in several > separate partitions of various sizes. The last partition will > be 1 TB, and > will be the most important partition on the array. > > Now my problem is that this 1 TB partition must be able to > grow beyond 2 TB > at a later stage (after adding extra HD's). If I understand > correctly, it is > not possible to grow a UFS partition beyond 2 TB when the > drive is > partitioned with fdisk. One should use GPT instead. However, > it appears that > GPT currently has no way to resize partitions, giving me no > possibility to > enlarge the 1TB partition and run growfs. > > Does anyone have a suggestion? Or am I overlooking something? > I can hardly > imagine that what I want is very rare, so I think there must > be some > solution. You can use the Areca controller to create separate devices/LUNs, and then ignore fdisk/gpt/labels altogether for the large filesystem you want to grow, and just stick the filesystem directly on /dev/da1, or whatever it ends up being. As a bonus, you don't have to do all the calculations to figure out where the partitions should start. See: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/2006-October/002312.h tml Regards, Jan Mikkelsen.