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

[Reginald Beardsley]

Having got the 3 TB disk working in the Solaris 10 system where it belongs, I think I'll pass on doing battle w/ booting from disks > 2 TB.

I've got a zpool on a 3 TB USB disk actually functioning w/ 151_a7 which is a big improvement, but it complains about the alignment.  I've been studying:

http://wiki.illumos.org/display/illumos/ZFS+and+Advanced+Format+disks

trying to find a way to fix that.  I put what looked like the correct incantations in sd.conf, but a reboot doesn't seem to have solved it.  It would be very helpful to know how closely the identifier string needs to be to what format(1m) reports.  As I read things, it should be the concatenation of the Vendor & Product strings. I tried to copy it exactly, but have no clue if it read it correctly or just silently ignored it.

After modifying sd.conf and rebooting, mdb reports:

    un_sys_blocksize = 0x1000
    un_tgt_blocksize = 0x1000
    un_phy_blocksize = 0x200

for the USB disk.  However prtvtoc reports 4096 bytes/sector as does "format -> verify"

Not sure where to from here.

Have Fun!
Reg


--- On Sat, 1/26/13, Jim Klimov <jimklimov at cos.ru> wrote:

> From: Jim Klimov <jimklimov at cos.ru>
> Subject: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] OI 151_a7 install on 4k sector disk
> To: openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org
> Date: Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:38 PM
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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