From: Behalf Of J. Epperson > > I'm somehow missing how getting the non-installable smaller > GPT VD to be /dev/sda will change that scenario. The other > responder echoed one of my initial thoughts when he suggested > turning off the external array. That should do it.
If I could get the internal raid controller to be /dev/sda, then the RHEL/centos installer will not care about the fact that the external array is too big and would require GPT to boot off of, then the installer would let me proceed. It was only an issue with it being /dev/sda since that made the installer think there was no way to writen an MBR and boot off of it. But, unplugging external did lead me the right direcation. What I've had to do is this: 1) Internal array I had desired to be single RAID 50 across 8 drives. Thanks to Dell's choice of LSI for their current raid controllers and LSI missing the feature that most others seem to have in being able to present parts of one array as multiple logical drives, I ended up having to waste the first two drives to make a RAID 1 mirror smaller than 2 TB and then only six remaining drives in the RAID 50. 2) Unplugged the external array and installed centos using normal non-GPT boot to the raid 1 virtual drive. It installed to /dev/sda. 3) After install, edit /boot/grub/device.map and changed it to show: (hd0) /dev/sdb Then: grub grub> device (hd0) /dev/sda device (hd0) /dev/sda grub> root (hd0,0) root (hd0,0) Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83 grub> setup (hd0) setup (hd0) Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... no Checking if "/grub/stage1" exists... yes Checking if "/grub/stage2" exists... yes Checking if "/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes Running "embed /grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0)"... 15 sectors are embedded. succeeded Running "install /grub/stage1 (hd0) (hd0)1+15 p (hd0,0)/grub/stage2 /grub/grub.conf"... succeeded Done. 4) Reboot, connect external array while server is rebooting, comes back up and boots off of internal array from bios, grub is happy because now it is set up for /dev/sdb. Only downside to this situation is if something were to fail and take the external array down the server won't boot since internal will go back to being /dev/sda. But if the external array is down then we've got issues anyway. :-) Thanks, David _______________________________________________ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list [email protected] https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
