[OpenIndiana-discuss] OI 151_a7 install on 4k sector disk

[Jan Owoc]

On Sat, Jan 26, 2013 at 7:08 AM, Reginald Beardsley <pulaskite at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I'm trying to install on a 3 TB HGST disk which reports 512 byte sectors using the text installer. The system is an HP N40L and is intended to be a ZFS based NFS server for a Solaris 10 workstation.
>
> format(1m) correctly sees the size of the disk and I'm able to create a 128 GB slice for a root pool and the rest (2.6 TB) for the eventual RAIDZ pool.
>
> However, the installer keeps telling me that I can't use more than 2 TB.
>
> I can't find anything about installing onto 4K sector disks in the wiki or elsewhere.

I'm not aware of OpenIndiana-specific documentation to this problem,
but I recall reading that both the most recent OpenSolaris as well as
the current Solaris 11 can't be installed on disks >2TB. It had
something to do with booting off a disk with a GPT label.

I can't find the documentation in Solaris 11 describing the problem
(maybe Oracle fixed it), but here it is in Solaris 10:
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23823_01/html/819-5461/zfsboot-2.html
(toward the bottom).


> I can't see why the installer wouldn't look at the EFI label and just ask which slice I want to install on instead of wanting to redo it.  Will the desktop installer do what I need?

Again, in the above documentation it says that the label on the root
disk *must* be SMI, and therefore cannot be EFI. Again, work may have
been done since Solaris 10, but I'm not aware of OI-specific
documentation of this problem.


Cheers,
Jan