PVE installation problem (partitions)

[westley]

Hello,

after doing some tests on a AMD64 that worked out very well for me and waiting for the target platform I am now not able to install PVE on the target platform at all.
Changing to the console prompt of the installer it tells:

fsdisk: ERROR: sector 0 does not have an msdos signature
/dev/sda: unrecognized partition table type
Old situation:
No partitions found
New situation:
Units = blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

Device Boot Start End #blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 32 524319 524288 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 524320 3900702486 3900178167 8e Linux LVM
/dev/sda3 0 - 0 0 Empty
/dev/sda4 0 - 0 0 Empty
Warning: partition 1 does not end at a cylinder boundary
Successfully wrote the new partition table

Re-reading the partition table ...

If you created or changed a DOS partition, /dev/foo7, say, then use dd(1)
to zero the first 512 bytes: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/foo7 bs=512 count=1
(See fdisk(8).)
File descriptor 5 left open
File descriptor 6 left open
WARNING: Forcing physical volume creation on /dev/sda2 of volume group "pve"
Volume group "pve" successfully created
File descriptor 5 left open
File descriptor 6 left open
WARNING: This metadata update is NOT backed up
Volume group "pve" siccessfully created
File descriptor 5 left open
File descriptor 6 left open
WARNING: This metadata update is NOT backed up
WARNING: This metadata update is NOT backed up
Logical volume "swap" created
File descriptor 5 left open
File descriptor 6 left open
WARNING: This metadata update is NOT backed up
WARNING: This metadata update is NOT backed up
Logical volume "root" created
File descriptor 5 left open
File descriptor 6 left open
Rounding up size to full physical extent 3.53 TB
Insufficient free extends (402303) in volume group pve: 925568 required
Unable to create data volume - 1280 at /usr/bin/proxinstall line 309.
chroot: cannot run command 'dpkg-divert': No such file or directory
*** unhandled exception in callback:
*** unable to remove start-stop-daemon diversion: ERROR at /usr/bin/proxinstall line 560.
*** ignoring at /usr/bin/proxinstall line 986


My target system is a Tyan 2932-E equipped with an Adaptec SAS/SATA controller 31205 in the first PCIe x8 slot, with 12x Seagate 500 GB ES.2 RAID drives, configured as a RAID 50 (2x5) + 2xHS, Block size 256KB.

Wouldn't it be possible to let the user optionally control the size of the needed partitions during install ?

In need to have the system up and running latest by Monday evening.
What would be the best workaround for me ?

Many thanks,
Mike

 

[westley]

After some investigation I found out, that the installer seems to try to create partitions of the correct size, but the disklabel used is 'msdos' and thus the lvm2 partition is smaller that expected.

Wouldn't it be an idea to use parted to create efi-gpt partitions (include support for these type of partition in the kernel for sure) and use elilo as boot loader ?

 

[dietmar]

EFI is not widely supported, but sure, it would be a solution.

The normal workaround is to create 2TB slices with your RAID controller (not sure if your RAID controller supports that).

- Dietmar

 

[westley]

I did it now this way:

- installed PVE on a separate disk
- installed parted
- partitioned the large disk to PVE's needs
- copied /boot and lvm2vol's to the target partitions
- changed fstab (because the lvm VG is called pve1)
- changed lilo.conf to install on a third, USB disk
- copied /boot to USB
- changed boot order
- done.

It seems to work very well, hope I did not forget anything.

Thanks,
Mike