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Sergey
Asked: 2011-04-14 08:56:24 +0800 CST

Using 3TB HDD as boot drive on non-EFI BIOS

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I'm in weird situation, where I bought 3TB drives, only to discover that server's bios does not support it (should have done my homework)...

But I still need to install them in the server, and boot from them. I was thinking there should be some way to format the disk or something like that so that BIOS would work with it. But that does not seem to be a popular topic, so search does not yield many info...

The set up is like this: I have 3 HDD slots, and I intend to install CentOS onto the drives in a software raid 5 configuration. Any idea how I can do it? When partitioning at install time - I'm given a message that bios won't load (even if splitting into under 2TB partitions), and can't proceed.

linux bios boot

5 Answers

  1. Two options that could work:

    1. Buy a PCIe controller and try booting from this.
    2. Use a smaller disk as boot drive, or even an USB stick, maybe with nothing more than the boot loader and the /boot directory.

    I don't think 3TB drives are such a good idea for servers, as recovery times from RAID failues will be astronomical.

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  2. Your cheapest solution would be to buy a 3rd party hard drive controller that would support your 3tb drives and be supported natively by your version of Centos.

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  3. Best Answer

    BIOS will be your stumbling point. MBR-style boot reads the first sector of the first hard drive. For a 3TB drive, that first sector is likely to be 4KB, and not 512b like it has been since the dawn of PC computing. If BIOS isn't set up to deal with that, it simply will not boot. An updated BIOS will be required to handle it, if such is even available.

    That said, if the BIOS can handle a 4KB sector size, or is actually counting on an EFI BIOS and still has 512b sectors (don't know if this critter even exists), it should boot.

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  4. AFAIK, there is support in Linux bootloaders like GRUB2 for booting from GPT using BIOS. Look up the BIOS Boot Partition.

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  5. Use a HDD smaller than 2TB to install and have almost but /home installed on it and locate /home in the biggest disk.

    I have two 3TB Toshiba disk and a 4TB WB blue disk and I have tested with Linux Mint, Ubuntu and Windows. I installed the OS in a 120GB SSD and the rest of the disk are Non booting and I can format at full capacity.

    I also tested a 4 ports dedicated Sata RAID Controller with its own BIOS and explicitally tells me than the RAID Volume must NOT exceed 2TB at raid creation screen

    Blessings

    Claudio

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