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

[Jim Klimov]

On 2013-01-26 17:29, Reginald Beardsley wrote:
>> 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.

FWIW, I read that EFI/GPT labels have a compatibility mode to SMI/MBR
tables, allowing to present (part of) the lower 2Tb as a legacy MBR,
and this was specifically a mode to allow booting older Windows and
such from newer huge disks.

It may be worthwhile to research whether you can trick the OS, GRUB,
ZFS and the installer into thinking it has an MBR-partitioned disk
with a Solaris partition and slices dedicated to the rpool (further
mirrored), and then use the rest of the disk as another GPT partition
with a component of a data pool (further raidz1?)

In fact, it would suffice if you can trick ZFS, OS and GRUB into this
partitioning setup. An uncooperating installer can be worked around
by just cpio'ing the Live distro environment to an rpool you'd create
manually, see Wiki:

http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/Advanced+-+Manual+installation+of+OpenIndiana+from+LiveCD+media

Whether such trickery ultimately works or not - please let us know ;)

//Jim