formatting a 12.73 Tb disk on ROCKS 5.2

[Mike Burger]

> I was going to use parted and create a partition, but I don't know what to
> use for the end point.
>
> Model: AMCC 9650SE-16M DISK (scsi)
> Disk /dev/sda: 14.0TB
> Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
> Partition Table: gpt
>
>
> On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 11:44 AM, <m.roth at 5-cent.us> wrote:
>
>> Doll, Margaret Ann wrote:
>> > I used the BIOS setting to create the raid system.  I couldn't format
>> it,
>> > so I ran fdisk, deleted the partition and created a new partition.
>> The
>> > new partition with fdisk was approximately the same size as the
>> original
>> > partition created by the BIOS.
>>
>> Ok, I don't know what you mean by the BIOS setting - on what? Is this
>> attached to a server, or is this an "appliance"? If the former, do you
>> mean the firmware for an HBA?
>>
>> At any rate, you *cannot* use fdisk to do anything with this. There are
>> hard-coded limits with fdisk - you *must* use either parted (which is
>> user
>> surly, if not outright hostile) or gparted (the GUI version, which is,
>> well, ok). And you must specify that the partition table - there is no
>> MBR
>> as we know it, for something this big - must be GPT, not MBR.
>>
>>       mark
>> >
>> > On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 11:19 AM, <m.roth at 5-cent.us> wrote:
>> >
>> >> Doll, Margaret Ann wrote:
>> >> > I have a raid-5, /dev/sda on a NAS node that has 12.73 Tb of space.
>> >> >
>> >> > mkfs xfs /dev/sda1
>> >> > mke2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006)
>> >> > mkfs.ext2: invalid blocks count - /dev/sda1
>> >> >
>> >>
>> >> Question 1: Margaret - did you use parted or gparted, or fdisk, or
>> some
>> >> NAS utility to create the logical partition? If anything other than
>> an
>> >> HBA
>> >> controller, you've cannot use fdisk, which cannot deal with anything
>> >> larger than 2TB.
>> >>
>> >>         mark
>> >>
>> >> > I can use
>> >> >
>> >> > mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1 works, but it only formats the first 2Tb of
>> space.
>> >> >
>> >> > filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
>> >> > /dev/sdb1              19G  2.8G   16G  16% /
>> >> > /dev/sdb5             875G  200M  830G   1% /state/partition
>> >> > /dev/sdb2             4.8G  184M  4.4G   5% /var
>> >> > tmpfs                 3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /dev/shm
>> >> > /dev/sda1             2.0T  199M  1.9T   1% /bigdisk1
>> >> >
>> >> > How do I get the complete raid system formatted?
>> >> >
>> >> > Thanks

There's another option, altogether.

Skip gparted, altogether, and use LVM. Set the entire /dev/sda as an LVM
physical volume (instead of creating any partitions on it), add the PV to
a volume group, and then build filesystem(s) out using logical volume(s),
instead.

-- 
Mike Burger
http://www.bubbanfriends.org

"It's always suicide-mission this, save-the-planet that. No one ever just
stops by to say 'hi' anymore." --Colonel Jack O'Neill, SG1