DL380 G7 - Install O/S to 4TB array...

[Dave Onex]

Hi Bob;

I just wanted to thank you for your advice - last night (and early this morning :-) I re-installed the O/S this time following your steps.

I created one raid 6 array and then created two logical drives (350 MB) and the remainder of the open space.

When Windows came back I was able to right-click the second drive and choose GPT.

So your advice was spot on. Just for the record (and for others who also want to install the O/S to a single large partition) this is what I found out;

In order to use one large partition (larger then 2TB) and boot off of it the BIOS needs to support UEFI. According to Compaq (as of Aug 2010) they are not pursuing UEFI support at this time.

Windows supports both regular MBR and UEFI/GPT. The key sentence seems to be this though, in order to boot off a larger then 2TB partition the BIOS must support UEFI.

So, I learned something new (although I really figured that with a new machine and the latest O/S there would have been no issues).

At any rate, thanks very much for your help! It's all fixed-up now :-)

[Dave Onex]

BTW, in short, it's basically what Johan said right from the start of this thread :-)

[Bob_Vance]

This has been an interesting and very informative thread !

Yes, as I read Johan's 2nd post, I see that I basically repeated what he said :[
I didn't mean not to credit him -- I just didn't read it carefully enough.


One note:
on the older, external arrays, MSA1000 & 1500, you assigned the RAID level at the LD level, not the "Array" level.
((within the constraints of the number of disks in the "Array".
E.g., with only two disks then you could only do LDs with RAID0 or RAID1.
))

So, apparently, on the internal Smart Array controllers, you have to do it at the "Array" level?

This is the same as for the MSA2000s, which annoys me,



BTW, for other reading this thread, the terminology on the Smart Array controllers is this:

1) "Array" is a group of disks from the total set of available disks.
((The EVA Array terminology is "Disk Group", which I think is more accurate.
The MSA2000s call it a Virtual disk, which makes no sense to me.
))
So, from 6 total disks, you could create, for example,
a 2-disk "Array"
& a 4 disk "Array"
or one 6-disk "Array" (as you did).
This can be confusing, since we usually think of "Array" as the whole set of disks and logic to manage them.


2) From an "Array" you can create multiple Logical Disks -- slices of the disk group.
((EVA calls this a Virtual Disk.
MSA2000 call it a Volume !
))

The LD is what is presented as a LUN to the server(s), and shows up as a separate physical disk in the server.

The original install only created *one* LD out of the 6-disk "Array", so Windows was only seeing one "disk" (drive), with a couple of partitions on it.


3) "Partition" is just within the OS, carving up the "Physical" disk.


So, the terminology is very important from a transfer of knowledge point of view and can become very confusing among the various HP Array models!



bv

[Johan Guldmyr]

I'm glad you got it working =)

[tbirdguy]

Not to bring up a 2+ yr old thread, but I wanted to thank all here, after pulling my thinning hair out trying to configure an ml110 with a b110i with 4 2TB drives... I had almost given up and was going to use SBS 2011 to configure the raid instead...
thanks to all of you!

[rojanaust]

Thank you.   This worked for us also!

HP StoreEasy 1430 with 4x 3TB SATA Disks with P222 512MB Controller.    (StoreEasy 1430 is basically a DL320 G8..)

Ran into the same issue, booting Windows Server 2008 or 2012 and got "Cannot install Windows on GPT Disks.."

1.  Boot into ACU

2.  Select all Four (4)  3TB Disks, create RAID5 array

3.  Make 1 Logical Drive 500GB

4.  Make 1 Logical Drive the rest which was about 8TB..

5.  Boot up Windows Server install and install Windows on the 500GB disk

6.  After installation, disk managment and convert the bigger disk to GPT.  All done!

Tried doing this with 3rd party partition tools like Gparted but it wants you to create the parition table first which is either MBR (MSDOS) or GPT.  Tried MBR, but after installig Windows I could not do anything with the bigger volume. It was greyed out!  I also had grief using the provisioning tool v1.60.

Cheers

[LID]

Hello,

Are you sure that is possible to create 2x logical drive once the RAID 5 has been created?

Usually when you select the 4 disks and create the RAID 5, ACU will give you the possibility to create only one unique logical drive  MBR that will be limited to 2 TB.

Thanks,

Liberato

[waaronb]

The array config util (or SAS) lets you create the array and then you can create whatever logical drives on the array.

For example, you could create an array out of 8 physical disks and then create the first logical drive as a RAID 1+0 using some of the space and then a RAID 5 or 50 using the rest of the space. (Just an example of course). Or use the same RAID levels on all the logical drives, just using different amounts of space.

Mixing the RAID levels for different logical drives on the same array depends on having a certain # of disks of course... an odd number won't let you do RAID 1 or 1+0 but would work fine for RAID 5 and possibly RAID 50, for example.

The boot-time array controller setup ("press F8") doesn't give you those kinds of options... you need to boot off the SPP / Smartstart and use the full array config in there.

I think the Gen8 boxes do have a better array config you can access from the setup... I don't remember off the top of my head but that rings a bell. Maybe part of the built in "intelligent provisioning".

[Sharanya_KR]

What a great post!!!

Solution given  here worked like a charm...

You have saved loads & loads of my time.. Thanks :-)

[Sbrown]

You need to never use [F8] to configure your raid to have the ability to slice and dice the number of disks to virtual raid-levels. Once you create the first raid with [F8] option bios, you will not be able to create more slices! Good reason for having a boot CD around for configuration of the array should you want to have a raid-1/10/5 array on the same number of disks!