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GParted forum → Live Media → Large RAID drive shows up with negative size
I have a machine with a 1.34TB RAID5 on a 3Ware 9550 -- GParted detects everything just fine, and shows me my partitions, but appears to be rather confused about the size of the partition -- it shows a very large negative number (sounds like an integer overflow to me). It won't let me resize the partitions neither, most likely for that same reason. The version I've been using is LiveUSB 0.3.1-1.
Any workarounds for this?
RAId are not yet supported by GParted ; and i wonder if such a size could too.
We hade some issue with SATA 350 go last days, so .....
But maybe plors could add some usefull informations about that.
hmmz, can you send us some screenshots and/or numbers? sounds like an overflow and i like to fix it asap.
thnx
http://home.lyse.net/Warlord2k/gp.jpg
This is a Lacie 2TB Bigger Disc connected with FireWire..
Here u have atleast one example..
The 1TB'ers I have works nice.. But seems like it won't be happy about over 1.. Or maybe it can be cause windows hasn't formatted it yet?
issue was fixed with formating it to NTFS first and then formatting it to EXT3:=) But still, if it's entirely fresh, then ur screwed..
ah ok, that looks like a _very_ old version of gparted. Please use the latest (0.3.1), many issues were fixed in that time 
On a Dell PowerEdge 2850 pre-installed with SLES 9.1 with 1.1 TB local in a RAID5 configuration, using GParted LiveCD v0.3.3-0
/dev/sda1 -- boot -- 101.94 MiB ext3
/dev/sda2 -- swap -- 1.00 GiB
/dev/sda3 -- data and applications -- 1.09 TiB
We want to split the last partition into about 100 GB and 1 TB, still reiserfs.
However, the device selector in the top right shows only /dev/sda (this is expected) with a size of -999119409152.00 B (obviously, this is not). In the Resize/Move dialog for /dev/sda3, Maximum Size = -954034 MiB, any change to New Size reverts to this value when the text box loses focus, and the handles to drag and resize the partition are inoperative.
Any suggestions? Thanks!
Well, you'd better take advice from Plors who's the deve from GParted. but i guess such big hd are not yet implmented...
I'll try to reproduce this issue today and see if i can come up with something.
In the meanwhile, could you get me the output of the 'print' command from within parted ( 'parted /dev/sda' ) ?
thanks!
you guys were right, some variables were still defined as long which can only hold 2^32 == 4294967296 bytes == 4GigaBytes.
It's fixed and currently i'm checking the source for more occurances of this.
thanks for reporting
Absolutely, thanks for the quick turn-around!
I can't get at the server right now to try the print command (running it from LiveCD and the guy with access to the server room isn't here today), but is there anything else I can do to help?
no, thanks the print command isn't necessary anymore, it was just to check if the fault indeed originated from gparted.
i'm working on some other issue, but i expect to release gparted-0.3.4 this weekend.
I just want to follow up, not trying to pester, but has there been a bug filed for this that I can track? I didn't have any luck looking for it myself, and our boss wants an estimate of when we can get our server back online.
If an updated version isn't ready yet, can you point me at some directions for compiling a LiveCD myself? Thanks!
fastest way to do this is to compile gparted yourself from CVS and then run the resulting binary on the livecd. I'm not sure when we'll do a new release, maybe this weekend, but i'm not sure yet.
I have a raid5 1.4 Terrabyte disk array and used the 0.3.4 version which i found on sysresuecd.
The need was to incorporate a 'new' unused section of the logical volume into the existing ext3fs boot partition; adding about 800 Gb to the existing 540Gb.
I noticed that I could not resize the partition above 943.15 Gb....no matter what i did.
Any time I tried to go above this size i got a message sasying the the partition size could not be less than -1 sectors. (something like that, at least)
I concur that this sounds like an overflow condition.
This new data might help you identify the remaining overflows. Could be Parted or GTK, too
brian
sysresuecd usually contains older versions of gparted software. It would be better to try the last liveCD version (0.3.4-8), in this location:
http://gparted.sf.net/
Thanks for the prompt reply
OK I tried the latest versions (0.3.4-7 and 8) on the liveCD and its the same thing.
I checked out all the units I have here and they all exhibit this same phenomenon.
They are HP DL380 G4 with raid5 running on Smart Array 6i. Each has 12G of memory and the partitions are Ext3fs and each box is running RH 4 amd64 quite healthily except I can't seem to find any way to incorporate the unused space into my logical volume above 943.15G.
Parenthetically, isn't that 2^40?
Could this be a limitation of the Filesystem itself?
or could it be in the compiler? I'm just grasping at straws...
The message reads " The new partition cannot have -1 sectors"
Help!
I can do anything with a partition so long as its less than
It is not ext3fs limitation.
Ext3fs has higher limits: 2TB with block size = 1 KB, and 32TB with block size = 8 KB.
It might be a limit in the libparted librairies, or in gparted. I think there is a limitation, but I don't know exactly. Anyway, negative size makes us think to some overflow! (I'm just a gparted user myself, and less experienced than you in matter of raid, I'm afraid )
Has there been a fix found for this yet? I think I might be running into the same, or at least a similar problem. I get the -1 sector error message as well, but this is when I am resizing an existing ext2/ext3 partition. It currently is 840M and I've added a new disk to the array have have almost 1.2T available. When I try to resize, I fail somewhere around the 1024M mark (I'm going to go check again, but I'm posting this on the machine I'm working on so I have to reboot to the LiveCD to get the exact number).
Oh, and this is the 3.4-8 live disk, which is the latest one available.
Thanks!
-c
Unfortunately there is nothing new on this issue. In fact, the resizing part is essentially the same in the 0.3.4-x versions. Changes from version to version had to do mainly with the boot-up and hardware detection / driver sections. So, I dubt if even some of the previous versions could do anything better.
We already had reports that a partition couldn't expand to anything over ~1,050,000MB. (03/2007).
You could always try SystemRescueCD or Parted Magic. I have rather little hope however, because both use Gparted.
Thanks for the update! Yeah, the 1050G limit is what I am hitting too, which is unfortunate, but oh well, I guess I'll just drag my machine into work, find some place to copy all the data off, and start from scratch (gparted is the only tool I've found that will resize my particular RAID partition....guess I finally added one disk too many!).
Thanks again for your help!
-c
I'm also having this problem with my MegaRAID i4 controller w/4x 400GB drives in RAID 5. Has this bug already been officially reported?
It seems that your controller is supported. I think (not 100% sure) that the 1TB issue is related to libparted.
You could try parted-magic. I don't know however if it could do better, as it uses gparted and the same libraries too.
Yes, my controller has a driver and everything boots nicely. I'll try parted-magic (thanks for the suggestion!), and after that the command-line utilities.
I was just wondering where to report this bug, as now that 1TB drives/partitions are coming into more common use, it's likely to rear its head more frequently.
You can report the bug to the link:
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/bugs.php
(The link appears in the main Gparted site too).
I already found a related report there. You can add your comments, hardware / software configuration.
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