All,

I'm working on an HP Proliant DL385 server (Redhat EL 4.5 ES)and am unable to add a second hardware RAID. The system originally came with a P400 controller and 8X174GB SAS drives. I configured it to a RAID level 5 with hot spare for a total of ~845GB of usable space after all was said and done. All worked fine and dandy. Here I am a few months later needing to expand on the system, so I purchased an HP MSA60 storage array with 12X500GB SATA drives and a P800 controller (as that's what HP said was needed for the MSA60.) I removed the P400 and I moved the original RAID to the new controller... no problems... created the new RAID (level 5 w/hot spare, formated out to 4.657TB) via the controller firmware. The system boots fine and sees the original RAID, but the second array is rather persnickety. I initially tried to use fdisk to create a partition, but learned shortly that fdisk will not handle partitions > 2 TB. So I then attempted to use parted thusly:


# parted /dev/cciss/c0d1
GNU Parted 1.6.19
Copyright (C) 1998 - 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

Using /dev/cciss/c0d1
(parted) mklabel gpt
Error: Input/output error during write on /dev/cciss/c0d1
Retry/Ignore/Cancel?

No happiness here... seems that any read of the device (e.g. mklabel, mkpart, etc.) ends up with the same I/O error.

Anyone got any ideas?

thanks!

Also at boot there is the error:

Buffer I/O error on device /dev/cciss/c0d1

Another addition...

I just took the RAID down to 3 drives/level5/hot spare and was able to access via fdisk and create a filesystem. Seems that the issue is one of size.