Installing and Using NetBSD on 6 TB Drive

[John Maier <devocite%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hello Folks,

I have an old HP ML310 with a RAID controller, a 4 bay drive, populated 
with four 2TB drives.
The RAID at 5, yielding 6TB of total storage.  I just loaded NetBSD 8.0 
amd64 arch.

It is old enough, that it only supports BIOS drive booting.  Because of 
this, I can't leverage GPT partitioning/booting and therefore I'm 
constrained to a maximum of a 2TB NetBSD partition.

That leaves 4TB of unused space, I can't touch.

Reading over the How-To for large disk support, if this space were a 2nd 
disk, the task would be trivial.

I tried editing the disklabel d: and setting the offset at 2056576275, 
and  then tried:
newfs -O2 -F -s 9664314234 /dev/sd0d
The command succeeded, and when mounted showed all the extra space, but 
after writing the newly mounted partition, I started getting disk errors 
on sd0a.  I can only concluded that not only does the -F ignore the size 
on the disklabel, it ignores the start of a partition of the disklabel.

If this conclusion is true, is there a way to tell newfs to where to 
start writing?  Would newfs honor the starting sector of a sd0e?

Is there a way to have a GPT partition in addition to the NetBSD in the 
MBR?  I noticed with fdisk, I could create a 2nd MBR partition of type GPT.

Ideas?

THanks,

- jam
- jam