Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Apparently Bootable Volumes have a 2 TB Limit

Installing a new Windows Home Server box at my house, and I built it on a RAID array that had 2095 GBs. The problem was that the volume I created didn't show up in the boot menu of my Gigabyte motherboard as a bootable volume. It had to be less than 2048 GB for it to appear as a bootable volume.

Hopefully someone else who has this problem finds this post, because it took me two nights working on it to discover this little problem.

.. I'm actually pretty sure this is a hardware limit, as it had nothing to do with the Windows Home Server install.

2 comments:

Hescominsoon said...

First off turn off the motherboard FRAID. The proprietary drivers have a limit. Home server has it's own redundancy built in. Turn the mobo raid off and i bet things will go smoothly.

http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html

Anonymous said...

The limitation here is not in either the Hardware or in the Operating system.

More precisely You are running into the limitations of the MBR Partitioning scheme. You can create over 2TB drives using GTP partitions but because the hardware does not support EFI and GPT does not have the bootable information you cannot boot from a GPT partition table. The Itanium based servers that do have an EFI boot sector can get around this and will boot from the GTP partition tables but they are the only ones.

There is a good article on this here. http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/GPT_FAQ.mspx