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

[Robert von Bismarck]

Hello,

You might be hitting the 2TB partition barrier on the RAID-5 array, in that case you need to use a GPT partition table. Instead of 'fdisk', try with 'parted' which is GPT-aware.

Hope this helps,

Robert

> -----Message d'origine-----
> De : linux-poweredge-bounces at dell.com 
> [mailto:linux-poweredge-bounces at dell.com] De la part de Tomas Hajek
> Envoyé : jeudi, 16. avril 2009 16:53
> À : linux-poweredge at dell.com
> Objet : PowerEdge 2800 Perc 4e/di fdisk and format problem RAID 5
> 
> 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
> 
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