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

[Reginald Beardsley]

Sigh...  Thanks Jan.  On to plan B, whatever that is.  I'd really been hoping to have 4x3 TB RAIDZ w/ a mirrored root pool.  It's still doable, but it will be tedious to stuff two more disks in the box.

FWIW The drive in question is a replacement for a 512 byte HGST drive that I had to RMA.  It lies about the sector size and causes format(1m) to dump core on Solaris 10 U8.  As it turns out, I was able to properly label the drive using the OI 151_a7 text installer shell.  With that done, Solaris 10 allowed me to create a pool and I'm currently copying files from a USB drive using zfs send.  I'm not sure if I'm out of the woods yet, but it's at least a hopeful sign.

I tried to do this before, but via a USB/SATA adaptor which apparently didn't work past 2 TB.  My regular OI box only has one SATA port.

Note the wiki entry for 4k sector drives has broken links to a modified zpool command that sets ashift=12.  

Have Fun!
Reg

--- On Sat, 1/26/13, Jan Owoc <jsowoc at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Jan Owoc <jsowoc at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] OI 151_a7 install on 4k sector disk
> To: "Discussion list for OpenIndiana" <openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org>
> Date: Saturday, January 26, 2013, 8:44 AM
> 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
> 
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