Hey everyone,

I've been running a debian etch system for several years now with 3x1TB drives in a software RAID5 array. I bought three 3TB drives to replace the existing drives, and I think I've run into the "2.1TB barrier" based on some googling. I see this in the boot messages:



Do you guys know what I need to do to use these drives? They are recognized correctly (it seems) by my SATA controller card, but I have noticed that I can't boot the system when all drives are connected to this card (even just the 1TB drives). It seems my motherboard is not supporting boot to this controller card very well and requires a disk plugged in to the motherboard. My plan is to leave a 1TB drive as a boot/operating system device connected to the motherboard and would like to have the 3TB drives each with a single RAID partition in a 3-disk array. Then I can just copy the boot disk to the other two old 1TB drives for physical backup rather than dicking around with RAID1 for the OS.

Is a kernel upgrade sufficient? Some googling leads me to believe that a different partition manager is required. Would it be easier to just upgrade the entire system? Will the latest version of debian support the big drives? Is there a different distro you would recommend?

I'm using RAID1 partitions for /boot and / on the existing drives (4 partitions total, including the big storage raid5 partition and swap). If reinstalling is easiest, my plan would be to reformat the / and /boot partitions as non-RAID on an existing disk, leaving the large RAID5 partitions alone, then install. I'm assuming a new version of linux could use the existing raid5 partitions and array just fine?

I have backups of the data, but it's very slow media. I'm trying to get this done leaving the data on the RAID5 filesystem intact.

Hope all this rambling makes some sense...

Thanks in advance!

Jim