Difficulty with fdisk and cciss Raid 5

[ED SHERMAN]

I have an HP Proliant DL180G5 with SuSE Linux 10 SP2 installed.

I have a 5TB Raid array composed of disks that are internal to the machine.

lorapp01:~ # cat /proc/driver/cciss/cciss0
cciss0: HP Smart Array P400 Controller
Board ID: 0x3234103c
Firmware Version: 5.22
IRQ: 98
Logical drives: 1
Sector size: 2048
Current Q depth: 0
Current # commands on controller: 0
Max Q depth since init: 5
Max # commands on controller since init: 161
Max SG entries since init: 31
Sequential access devices: 0

cciss/c0d0: 5000.85GB RAID 5


Here is the partition listing so far from fdisk:

lorapp01:~ # fdisk /dev/cciss/c0d0

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 607986.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/cciss/c0d0: 5000.8 GB, 5000855773184 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 607986 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/cciss/c0d0p1 * 1 39163 314576766 83 Linux
/dev/cciss/c0d0p2 39164 52218 104864287+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/cciss/c0d0p3 52219 319567 2147480842+ 8e Linux LVM


I want to add a fourth partition with 1.9 TB but when I try to add it then fdisk wants to use the same starting cylinder 52219 as the previous third partition:

Command (m for help): n
Command action
e extended
p primary partition (1-4)
p
Selected partition 4
First cylinder (52219-607986, default 52219):

I choose 319568 but after adding the 4th partition and printing the partition table it shows the starting cylinder 52218, which is 1 cylinder less than the previous partition.

First cylinder (52219-607986, default 52219): 319568
Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (319568-607986, default 607986):
Using default value 607986

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/cciss/c0d0: 5000.8 GB, 5000855773184 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 607986 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/cciss/c0d0p1 * 1 39163 314576766 83 Linux
/dev/cciss/c0d0p2 39164 52218 104864287+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/cciss/c0d0p3 52219 319567 2147480842+ 8e Linux LVM
/dev/cciss/c0d0p4 52218 73288 169241969+ 83 Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order


Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks,
Ed

[Ivan Ferreira · Accepted solution]

Maybe is a problem because of the size of the partitions and fdisk cannot handle it correctly.

http://anothersysadmin.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/fdisk-and-the-15tb-partition-size-limit/

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/fdisk-unable-to-create-partition-greater-2tb.html

[ED SHERMAN]

Thank you for the speedy response.