Question

Linux - sdb : very big device. try to use READ CAPACITY(16)

Asked by: CrazyDon

Hi,

We have a fileserver that has a raid 5 on a 3ware raid card. One of the partitions filled up and we decided to increase the size of the filesystem by replacing all of the 320gig drives with 750gig drives. The array is rebuilt with the new drives for 4.2 tb of storage.

When I reboot linux, the following is put into the system log.

SCSI device sdb: 8788930560 512-byte hdwr sectors (4499932 MB)
sdb: Write Protect is off
sdb: Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00
SCSI device sdb: write cache: enabled, read cache: disabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
sdb : very big device. try to use READ CAPACITY(16).
SCSI device sdb: 8788930560 512-byte hdwr sectors (4499932 MB)


Shouldn't linux be able to see an ext3 filesystem  bigger then 4tb. This is the 32-bit version of centos, so would this problem go away if I went to the 64-bit centos version?. This is an Intel P4/Xeon, so if I need to move to the 64-bit version, would I use the ia64 or the x86_64 version of centos?

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Asked On
2007-05-15 at 11:39:50ID22573908
Tags

read

,

big

,

very

,

use

,

try

Topic

Linux Setup

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Answers

 

by: admin0Posted on 2007-05-16 at 00:05:35ID: 19098918

Hi.,

Please use CentOS 5 on the x86_64 version.
That would help.

Cheers,

 

by: CrazyDonPosted on 2007-05-16 at 12:17:03ID: 19103447

I finally solved it myself.  Look at that nice 4.1T partition.

[root@qf3 VTL]# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2              50G  7.0G   40G  15% /
/dev/sda1              99M   28M   67M  30% /boot
/dev/sdc1             1.4T  834G  472G  64% /data1
none                  505M     0  505M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda5              59G  761M   56G   2% /export/home
/dev/sdb1             4.1T  121M  4.1T   1% /VTL

In case others want to know, you need to do things a little differently. First, I needed to compile my kernel with support for very large block devices. Next, you do not use fdisk, but parted instead. parted will see and create the partition and use it's full capacity.

Cheers!

 

by: AnnieModPosted on 2007-06-29 at 06:53:04ID: 19389605

PAQed with points refunded (500)

AnnieMod
Cleanup Admin

 

by: kakubeiPosted on 2008-08-28 at 04:35:45ID: 22333608

CrazyDon,

I am curious why you had to recompile the kernel for very large block devices. What kernel version did you have? My undrestanding is that since 2.4.6, all distributions had this in the kernel already. And which package did you use to compile the support?

I ask because we are facing a similar situation where I have had to use a gtp partition table instead of an msdos partition table (the 2TB limitation is really of the msdos partition table, that is why fdisk does not work, it doesn't do anything other than msdos partition tables) and had some issues.

In my case, we have a 32-bit OS, Fedora Core 5 with an Apple Xraid system through a fiber channel card. We initially had some problems with the qlogic driver and the linux kernel, we had to downgrade the kernel considerably (running 2.6.15-1.2054). This worked. But after creating a 2.76 TB partition, the OS sees it, but we kept having all sorts of I/O errors and processes accessing ilegal blocks, etc.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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