Arch Linux

VirtualRider

Member

Registered: 2008-08-20

Posts: 134

Booting from hard disks >2TB - bootable USB flash drive GRUB (w/o OS)?

Hi,

I'm thinking about setting up a hardware supported RAID on a Debian-server (Proxmox) with lots of HDD-space. Therefore, my RAID-array will be >2TB, but I've read that the BIOS of the system will not be able to boot from such. Do you have a solution for this?

I was thinking about installing a bootable GRUB on an USB flash drive, which would then chainload the RAID's GRUB for booting. Is this even possible? I couldn't find any tutorial on how to create/boot only a (customizable) GRUB from the flash drive.

Another option would be to create multiple disks by the RAID-controller, but i'm not sure what happens with the chunks, if i would add another disk to the RAID to expand it.

A third solution, that came to my head, is simply installing Proxmox on a separate disk and detach it from the RAID. But in case of a disk failure, it would not be protected and i would rely on snapshot-backups - so i rather would not like to go with that solution.

Let me know what you think!
VR

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: Booting from hard disks >2TB - bootable USB flash drive GRUB (w/o OS)?

I don't know about the answers to your issues, as I have never tried any disks that large.  But it would probably be wise not to mention that you are trying to do this on a non Arch system, as now I am pretty sure you will not recieve the help you desire.

I don't mean to say that I encourage you to try to dupe our community into helping you with your debian system by not mentioning it.  But it seems pretty silly to come to the Arch threads looking for debian support, even if it is a universal (os independent) issue.