Hardware

• Dell Precision T7500
  • 24 GB RAM (6x2GB, 6 slots free)
  • Nvidia GTX400 graphics card
  • Dell Perc 6i RAID controller
  • 4 x 2TB drives connected to controller

Issue

• Drives larger than 2TB cannot be managed by fdisk
• Need GPT formatting tools * CentOS5^? does not support booting from GPT formatted drives

Solution

BIOS setup

• Set up RAID in RAID BIOS (ctrl-r when prompted during boot)
• Create one virtual disk, RAID 5, size 200GB
• Create second virtual disk, RAID 5, size 5.4 TB (remainder of disk space)
• Initialize both (~4.5 h)

Installation

• Boot from CentOS5^?.5 DVD
• Choose /dev/sda as disk for all installs
• make 250 MB /boot partition
• 8 GB swap partition
• remainder of /dev/sda taken by root filesystem

Post installation

• initialize /dev/sdb using parted:

 sudo /sbin/parted /dev/sdb
  mklabel gpt
  mkpart primary 0-0
  quit

• Above makes a single partition spanning entire RAID drive

*format

 sudo /sbin/mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1

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-- BillRice - 20 Jan 2011