Problems formatting a RAID 5, 4,5 Tb sized disk
 

Hello all,

Please apologize me if Im not posting in the correct forum but I wasnt really sure about where to write this.

I was installing redhat 4 on a server(amd quad core,16gb RAM), with two hw raids. The first is a mirror for the OS, and the second is a raid 5 composed by 6 sata drives 1tb big. The raid controller is a 3ware 9650se.

All was correct, I could format this problematic raid 5 during the installation with no complains, but when I rebooted the computer it was saying there were errors with this disk.

I tried gparted and fdisk, and the strange thing was that it was showing just a small partition about 500 gb big leaving the rest as unallocated space that I cant format, It shows errors.

Thanks for reading!

Carlos.

What file system type are you using? If it is ext2 or ext3 you probably don't have enough inodes and your cluster size is probably too small. I don't know what the maximum partition size is for ext3 but you can specify 8096 byte cluster size and more inodes than you currently have now. You can see these parameters using tune2fs.

If you are using a different file system type you may have similar problems but I'm not familiar with the capacity tuning parameters for other file system types.

solved!
 

Thanks for your reply stress_junkie.

I have found an article about this. I was trying to format the partition changing the block size to 4096 as it is recommended for 4tb partitions but no luck neither. So I checked for info on the web, and I found out that many people faces the same problem:

For any one who is interested I leave some info about this:

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/fdisk-...eater-2tb.html

when I saw your topic right now, I guess it's an issue about 2TB+ formatting.
For system admins, I highly recommended to have a look at cyberciti.biz once per week, it's really a nice website with meaningful directions :)