From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Aug 10 14:28:24 2005 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4DC0E16A41F for ; Wed, 10 Aug 2005 14:28:24 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from dpk@dpk.net) Received: from shared10.hosting.flyingcroc.net (shared10.hosting.flyingcroc.net [207.246.149.144]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id F1EBF43D45 for ; Wed, 10 Aug 2005 14:28:23 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from dpk@dpk.net) Received: from shared10.hosting.flyingcroc.net (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by shared10.hosting.flyingcroc.net (8.12.9p2/8.12.10) with ESMTP id j7AESMrR023598; Wed, 10 Aug 2005 07:28:23 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (dpk@localhost) by shared10.hosting.flyingcroc.net (8.12.9p2/8.12.10/Submit) with ESMTP id j7AESMFH023594; Wed, 10 Aug 2005 07:28:22 -0700 (PDT) X-Authentication-Warning: shared10.hosting.flyingcroc.net: dpk owned process doing -bs Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2005 07:28:22 -0700 (PDT) From: dpk X-X-Sender: dpk@shared10.hosting.flyingcroc.net To: Valerio daelli In-Reply-To: <27dbfc8c05081006032ed290b4@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20050810071636.Y4031@shared10.hosting.flyingcroc.net> References: <27dbfc8c05081006032ed290b4@mail.gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: fdisk maximum partition size X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2005 14:28:24 -0000 On Wed, 10 Aug 2005, Valerio daelli wrote: > Hi all > does anyone know any maximum limit to the slice size in freebsd? > We would like to create a filesystem of 2.2T. > Is there any limit in fdisk and bsdlabel? > Thanks a lot fdisk does not support >2TB partitions -- at least, I've been unable to get it to work, just gives me zeros. From the advice I've read, what you'd be best off doing is skipping fdisk and labeling and just run newfs against the drive itself. IE: newfs /dev/da0 Of course, this means you will not be able to boot off of the large device. That's the price we pay for being "on the cutting edge". There are still several utilities that do not yet handle large partitions -- the project page is available here: http://www.freebsd.org/projects/bigdisk/ Another option for you is available if you're using the 3Ware cards: you can enable "auto-carving" in its BIOS, to split the device into 2TB chunks. FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE can only read the first of these chunks, but if you update to 5.4-STABLE, with its new twa driver, you can access the other chunks. (* There may be a better term than "chunks", but "slices" and "partitions" are already used interchangably (and non-interchangably), so I'm going with chunks.) This works out pretty well in practice except for having to divide files between mount points by hand. If you run into any panics or bugs about this please open PRs. There only seems to be a few of us FreeBSD users with multi-terabyte partitions and there are still some bugs to be worked out. You may not be able to get a kernel dump (I wasn't, even with 5.4-R and <1TB partitions (had to put the server into production before I could report this bug unfortunately)) but you could still get a backtrace for the developers to use.