PowerEdge 2800 Perc 4e/di fdisk and format problem RAID 5

[Tomas Hajek]

Good Morning all!
  
We have a Dell PowerEdge 2800 that has 2x 146GB disks in a RAID 1 
(Mirror) and 8x300GB disks in a RAID 5 on a Perc 4e/di controller.
During install of RHEL 5.2 I just put the OS on the mirrored disks.  
After install I wanted to format and create 5 ext3 partitions on the 
8x300GB RAID 5 array ( I have another system that is setup like this and 
working fine with RHEL 3 and this system was setup like this in the past).

The first problem I had was that with fdisk I could create 3 primary 
partitions and the extended partition but if I tried to create another 
partition as extended I received the error "no available sectors" or 
something very similar.   If I "verify the partition table" however it 
tells me a I have a very large number of unallocated sectors but any 
attempts to add another partitions yield the same no available sectors.

Trying various config I could create 1 large primary partition and 
format it appropriately but I really want to have 5 partitions.

I started again and tried to create 4 primary partitions but received 
the no available sectors errors when trying to create the 4th primary 
partition. Thinking that it might be some issue with the size of the 
RAID 5 being over 2TB I made a new array config keeping the Mirrored os 
disks and creating two smaller RAID 5 arrays each with 4x300GB disks.

I was able to create 3 primary partitions on one RAID 5 and 2 on the 
other but then the only partitions that would complete a format was the 
last one on the second RAID 5 array.  The others would get write the 
inodes but get stuck on "Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting 
information:".  At first I thought since it was a large file system that 
i was not being patient but I let is sit there overnight and it never 
completed.

I scrapped the RAID 5 arrays and kept the original RAID 1 mirror array 
and then added 4 additional mirrored sets so I now have and array config 
that looks like:
2x146GB RAID 1
2x300GB RAID 1
2x300GB RAID 1
2x300GB RAID 1
2x300GB RAID 1

This seems to be working fine but certainly wastes a lot of space.  Has 
anyone seen this problem?  Does anyone have a suggestion as to what 
might be causing this strange behavior.

Thanks,
 -Tomas