The Problem

Installing FreeBSD 8.x on a machine with two disk volumes of 100GB and slightly more than 3TB. The quantity of cylinders on the 3TB volume is greater than the 65,535 cylinders supported by bsdlabel. Therefore, the filesystem does not consume the total available disk space.

This is resolved by installing and implementing gpart. I won’t go into the procedure here as Warren Block blogs on this topic very well at http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/disksetup.html

Installing gpart

GPART is easily installed from FreeBSD.org package repos using pkg_add(1) as follows:

# pkg_add -r gpte

It may also be installed from ports by executing the following:

# cd /usr/ports/sysutils/gpte
# make install clean

Disclaimer

This blog is posted for informational purposes only. Extensive testing is recommended prior to implementing changes discussed here.