Partitioning Question - MBR - R5 - 4x1TB Drives

[0ptional]

So I've got a Dell Perc 5/i Raid card that is home to a new Raid5 array of 4x1TB WD Black drives.

Is MBR limited to 2TB total used space of the drive you are booting from, or should I be able to use the remaining space on my drive?
That is to say, I know that MBR has a 2TB limit on partition sizes, I know that I cannot overcome this by using GUID as my computer is not EFI based and therefore I would not be able to boot from it.

What I have now is my main array split into 4 parts, 2 of which I am unable to control as I would like.

What I have:
Disk 1
100MB System Reserved
745GB NTFS (C <- Windows 7 x64 Ult Boot partition
1302.90GB Unallocated
745GB Unallocated

in that order.. I want to make the 2 unallocated chunks into a 2TB disk, and I thought I'd be able to extend out the way I wanted to but no, I seem to be unable to use any more than 2TB of the disk no matter how I slice it up.

What I want:
Disk 1
100MB System Reserved
745GB NTFS (C <- Windows 7 x64 Ult Boot partition
2047.9GB NTFS (D <- Data partition spanning the remainder of the drive.

Is this something I will not be able to overcome? If so, color me unhappy with this endeavor... This is the XP w/o SP1 being unable to span greater than 127GB all over again... and with the sizes of today's disk, this seems totally unreasonable to me.. What can I do?

 

[0ptional]

Disabled smilies.. didn't notice that before heh.

Nobody has any clue yet huh? I've been reading all over, the way I understood it is just that the boot *partition* couldn't be any larger than 2TB, so I thought I could just make multiple martitions smaller than 2TB, but the reality is that I can't even select any more than 2TB of the drive to even format in total, so I'm stuck with 745GB unused...


EDIT:
Yeah, Everything I've read says that I should be fine and that so long as the partitions don't start after 2TB in the hdd, then I should be fine, and this is the case I'm in right now, and it's not working..

 

[nitrobass24]

No can do

What Raid card are you using?

 

[0ptional]

No can do

What Raid card are you using?

So I've got a Dell Perc 5/i Raid card that is home to a new Raid5 array of 4x1TB WD Black drives.

From the first post.

All the forum threads I'm reading say it's supposed to work the way I understand it, and I'm not happy with giving up 745GB on something like this...

I know windows MBR can't boot to a GPT partition without EFI, but would Grub be able to do it or could I boot into an EFI environment after the BIOS to bypass that?

I really want to use all my available space..

Some forum mentioned creating more than one virtual disk from the same array on the raid card and just let windows think it's 2 drives despite being 1 array, is that possible even?

 

[0ptional]

I fixed it.

What I did was destroy the R5 in the Perc 5/i Bios, and created a new one of the same disks, but instead I put 2 virtual disks on the same array, one of 745GB size the other of 2TB size, it's exactly how I wanted it and windows treats it how I expected it to.

Will there be any performance issues with this set up?

 

[0ptional]

I have another question, should I disable 'Write Caching' in the Windows settings because the RAID card offers this feature, or is this somehow connected with the settings in the RAID card?

Usually if I have hardware that does something, I make sure Windows isn't trying to do it too, is this the case here as well?

 

[Burner27]

I would have used the GPT setting in Disk Management instead....I have 4 x 2TB drives in a RAID 5 array and I have ~6TB usable.

 

[0ptional]

I would have used the GPT setting in Disk Management instead....I have 4 x 2TB drives in a RAID 5 array and I have ~6TB usable.

Thanks for the input, however this is my boot partition...

I can't use GPT if I want to boot from it, *UNLESS* I have a motherboard with EFI, which I don't, and those that do have big problems with using GPT partitions for booting, or at least the ones I'd consider while bringing over all of my other existing hardware.

The key thing here is that Windows cannot boot from a GPT partition from BIOS, ONLY from EFI, and without GPT I can't use all of my available space except for in the way that I did by making two virtual disks from the single array that corforms to the limits of MBR.