[OpenIndiana-discuss] building a new box soon- HDD concerns and recommendations for virtual serving

[Carl Brewer]

Further to my original post, I have a new (desktop, I know ... but I am 
on a tight budget) Intel MB with an i5-3750 CPU and 32 GB of desktop 
RAM.  Booting the 151a7 live DVD shows that it thinks it's a 32 bit 
system (huh?). It regognises almost all the devices when I run the 
device manager, but doesn't see any HDD's.  they're just not there at 
all.  At boot time it says they're too big for a 32 bit kernel.  Why is 
it booting a 32 bit kernel anyway?  Maybe some BIOS thing I need to set? 
  I booted the first (default) image that the live CD displays.

The MB is a DH77EB which is an H77 Express chipset.

As well as thinking it's 32 bit, it also doesn't see any drives at all. 
I have a single new Seagate 2TB (4k blocks?) ST2000DM001 in it that the 
live CD doesn't see at all.  I know there was a recent thread on 
installing to these drives that seemed inconclusive as to how best to 
install to them.  I want to have :

2 x 2TB HDDs for rpool (ZFS mirror)
4 x 2TB HDD's to get at least a 4TB mirror (or is RAID-Z a better option?)

Would I be better off with some 500GB HDD's for the rpool?  And while I 
fiddle with this thing, is there any way to get the live CD installer to 
work with these drives without poking around with some other OS to 
partition the drive?

help!

Thank you

Carl