[OpenIndiana-discuss] Installation on HD => 2TB

[Reginald Beardsley]

If you're not absolutely clear on how the partition table in the first sector on disk (aka fdisk or MBR partition) works, be very careful.  You can easily trash the other installs.  You're asking for an entry there to point to a Solaris partition table. I'm not current on what's going on w/ the various disk label schemes, but mostly because I avoid needing to know.  That's likely to change shortly.

What model disk?  

I'm about to do battle w/ installing OI_151a7 on 4k sector 2 TB Seagate disks in an HP N40L.  You can't boot OI from disks over 2 TB as they require an EFI label. Solaris 11.1 is reported to have fixed the problem, but even the Oracle doc's have not caught up to the change.

I can see the disks w/ format, but have not yet attempted to install.  I ran a surface analysis first since I'm building a file server w/ 3 disks.  Surface analysis on a 2 TB disk takes about 12 hours to run.

Did you run format(1m) manually?

I don't know what the current situation is, but years ago I installed FreeBSD, Linux & Solaris on the same disk.  It took probably a dozen install attempts to figure out.  Ultimately I had to alter the fdisk partition type ID, install the next OS, and then change it back.  There was also a particular order of install required because one of the installers was actively hostile to the others.  I don't recall which though.

IIRC (it was 10+ years ago) the main issue was Linux swap used the same fdisk partition ID as Solaris.

After that I switched to using removable drive caddies.  My current recommendation for laptops is to install to USB drives, but the 4k sector problem is making that difficult. But for a desktop system, the caddies are the way to go.

Have Fun!
Reg


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--- On Thu, 1/31/13, Mirko Fluher <mir at pax.apana.org.au> wrote:

> From: Mirko Fluher <mir at pax.apana.org.au>
> Subject: [OpenIndiana-discuss] Installation on HD => 2TB
> To: openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org
> Date: Thursday, January 31, 2013, 5:47 AM
> I recently tried .. to install OI
> 151a7 live  on the following computer;
> cpu i7
> mboard: gigabyte B75M-D3H
> HD: Segate SATA3 2TB
> with plenty of ram ...
> 
> it simply wouldn't install ... it cannot see the partition
> .. yet on that HD I run linux Ubuntu & Centos and have
> plenty of spare room.
> 
> I then decided to use an old 250G SATA2 HD ... and no
> problems - same settings in the Motherboard.
> 
> I told the installation program to use the entire HD.
> 
> mir at bigpax:~$ df -h
> Filesystem           
> Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> rpool/ROOT/openindiana
>                
>       196G  2.9G 
> 193G   2% /
> swap               
>    42G 
> 404K   42G   1%
> /etc/svc/volatile
> /usr/lib/libc/libc_hwcap1.so.1
>                
>       196G  2.9G 
> 193G   2% /lib/libc.so.1
> swap               
>    42G   48K   42G   1%
> /tmp
> swap               
>    42G   68K   42G   1%
> /var/run
> rpool/export         
> 193G   32K  193G   1%
> /export
> rpool/export/home 
>    193G   32K 
> 193G   1% /export/home
> rpool/export/home/mir
>                
>       193G   81M 
> 193G   1% /export/home/mir
> rpool             
>    193G   45K 
> 193G   1% /rpool
> /export/home/mir     
> 193G   81M  193G   1%
> /home/mir
> mir at bigpax:~$
> 
> 
> attached is a a dump of the output of 'gparted' as it is
> provided by the system. It complains about mount point ...
> but I assume there is a problem with gparted...
> 
> If anyone is running the above system on a 2TB HD, I would
> be curious to know how you did it ... ??
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> -----Inline Attachment Follows-----
> 
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