Quote:
Originally Posted by gimpy530
Do you mean you are getting the same results, one drive with a corrupted table? If so, I'll try it in a VM and if I can replicate it there, try the upstream kernel and file a bug report.
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It was actually happening on every drive I did it to (with parted). I would do a "
mklabel gpt" and "
mkpart primary 0 7G" then "
quit". I hammered-out a script to mess with the logical volume I put on the drives, and when I came back and checked my
syslog, I had a few errors (about three per stick). I didn't fully realize what was going on until I came across an
EFI/GPT chart (from
this guy). Note the bottom of the chart, where an extra copy of the table is kept.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gimpy530
fdsik cannot handle GPT or the kind of drives I will eventually move to. From the man page:
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How big is your single, largest disk? I've used
fdisk to setup a partition table on several 1TB drives, recently. Specifically,
fdisk (
util-linux 2.13-pre7) circa 05mar2006 on CentOS 5.5.
Can you give "
cfdisk" a shot and let me know if you're successful?
I've heard that fdisk cannot create a partition table that goes past 2TB (noted
here in 2006 and
here in 2007), and that appears to be true (though the man page doesn't say how large "large partitions" are).
Here's what I typically do;
1) Install disks.
2) Use
fdisk or
cfdisk to create "one big partition" on each drive. Tag it as "Linux RAID AutoDetect"
3) Use "mdadm" to create a RAID (in your case, it could just be one big stripe, RAID0, I do RAID10 when I can)
Code:
mdadm --create /dev/md# --level=raid10 --raid-devices=4 --name=name /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1
4) "
pvcreate /dev/md#" to make a physical volume.
5) "
vgcreate --physicalextentsize 32M --verbose vg# /dev/md#" to make the Volume Group.
6) "
lvcreate --extents # --name name /dev/vg# && mkfs.ext3 -m0 -L name /dev/vg#/name"
Limitations of fdisk
The newest stable build (2.18 30jun10)
available seems to suffer from the same fate as it's predecessors. I pulled down the source and did the following to get to the man page;
Code:
./configure --prefix /home/luser/testing ; make ; sudo make install ; man -M /home/luser/testing/share/man fdisk
Snippit from fdisk 2.18 manpage
Code:
fdisk does not understand GUID partition tables (GPTs) and it is not designed for large partitions. In these
cases, use the more advanced GNU parted(8).
BUGS
There are several *fdisk programs around. Each has its problems and strengths. Try them in the order cfdisk,
fdisk, sfdisk. (Indeed, cfdisk is a beautiful program that has strict requirements on the partition tables it
accepts, and produces high quality partition tables. Use it if you can. fdisk is a buggy program that does
fuzzy things - usually it happens to produce reasonable results. Its single advantage is that it has some sup-
port for BSD disk labels and other non-DOS partition tables. Avoid it if you can. sfdisk is for hackers only --
the user interface is terrible, but it is more correct than fdisk and more powerful than both fdisk and cfdisk.
Moreover, it can be used noninteractively.)
