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

[Aneurin Price]

On 17 April 2013 03:53, Carl Brewer <carl at bl.echidna.id.au> wrote:
> 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.

I don't know why it always boots the 32-bit version (I have a hard
time imagining why anyone would *ever* want to boot a 32-bit kernel on
a 64-bit machine, let alone enough for it to be the default), but you
can tell it not to:
When you boot from the live cd, at the grub prompt choose the option
to edit the boot command line, and change $ISADIR to amd64.

> 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.

That's normal; the 32-bit environment can't access 2TB+ drives. If you
boot the 64-bit kernel it'll see it just fine.

BTW, is there a particular reason for the choice of Virtualbox over KVM?