[Devil-linux-develop] Disks larger than 2TB

[Andrzej O. <an...@ma...>]

Dear Heiko,

Drives larger than 2TB is a reality. I bought 4TB drive in a store.

But although the Devil Linux is wonderfully suited to be the file server, 
still can not cope with such drives.

The solution is quite simple, and I propose to use them in the near future.

1. The structure of the partition table in the BIOS model can not deal with 
larger disks as 2^32 LBA it is 2TB, so we should use UEFI GPT partitioning.

But for the effective operation of such tables kernel should be compiled with 
the setting: CONFIG_EFI_PARTITION=y, otherwise kernel will do not recognise 
such partitions properly and the startup scripts will not cope for example in 
finding on such partitions configuration files.

2. Although support for GPT partition somewhat ensures parted, but a great 
addition to the package seems to be a GPT fdisk.
 
(http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/gptfdisk/gptfdisk/0.8.5/gptfdisk-0.8.5.tar.gz) 


This package depends on ncurses but if we do not modify its Makefile (I did 
not), to support unicode is needed ICU libraries package.

(http://download.icu-project.org/files/icu4c/49.1.2/icu4c-49_1_2-src.tgz)

I attach my scripts and configurations for these packages.

3. If we set the legacy_boot flag on GPT partition with Devil-Linux boot, we 
can boot DL on BIOS computer from 3TB drive (tested by me). This can be 
valuable when we run Samba on huge drive and don't want to charge the system 
with additional USB stick. But for this our syslinux build script should be 
modified to grant access to another mbr code, named gptmbr.bin and 
install-on-usb script should test partition table using for example, the 
following test:

[ "`parted -m -s $DEVICE print|grep "^$DEVICE"|awk 'BEGIN{FS=":"}{print $6}'`" 
== "gpt" ]

and selecting appropriate mbr.bin or gptmbr.bin to put into MBR.

Best regards

-- 
Andrzej Odyniec