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.
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.