gpt formatting and uefi booting

[m.roth at 5-cent.us]

Doll, Margaret Ann wrote:
> I have a Dell PowerEdge T120 with 12  4Tb disks.  I want to use the first
> disk as the system disk and the remaining 11 as a raid 5.
>
> I have the first disk set up as a raid 0.  I installed RedHat 6.4 server
> software on the first disk.  I set up the Dell to use a uefi boot instead
> of bios.  However, I cannot boot up the new system as the bios does not
> support the size of the system disk.

First, update it to 6.5. Like, yesterday. 6.4 will contain things like the
heartbleed bug, etc.
>
> I gather I should set up  gpt partitioning instead of the default mbr on
> the first disk.
>
> How do I do this?

You can either use the gui gparted, or the user hostile parted. Note that
if you do this, you'll probably have to reinstall - is that ok?

One other option would be to partition disk 0, say, into two 2GB
partitions,  and RAID 1 them. Alternatively, what we're doing here for
drives 1TB and over is to make a root partition of 500GB, and the rest as
another partition.

$ parted -a opt
   > mklabel gpt
   > mkpart pri (don't be confused - when they say "name, they mean
                     primary or extended....)
   >>  start: 0.0GB (will make sure it's actually aligned)
   >>  end: 100%
   > q
will make you one big drive.

       mark