Not booting off of a WD 3TB drive

I've spent the last few hours, nights, days trying to figure out why my pogoplug will not boot off of a 4gb ext3 partition on a 3 TB wd element drive. I finally gave up and loaded everything on a flash drive and voila.See the netconsole output below. Without the drive attached it boots the pogoplug stuff and I can ssh to it but when booting as below it hangs. Anyone have any ideas? What am I missing?

U-Boot 2011.12 (Feb 20 2012 - 21:21:59)
Pogoplug E02
arm-none-linux-gnueabi-gcc (Sourcery G++ Lite 2009q3-67) 4.4.1
GNU ld (Sourcery G++ Lite 2009q3-67) 2.19.51.20090709
Hit any key to stop autoboot: 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1  0
(Re)start USB...
USB: Register 10011 NbrPorts 1
USB EHCI 1.00
scanning bus for devices... 3 USB Device(s) found
scanning bus for storage devices... EHCI timed out on TD - token=0x10008d80
EHCI timed out on TD - token=0x128d80
1 Storage Device(s) found
Loading file "/rescueme" from usb device 0:1 (usbda1)

Perhaps Bodhi can give a better explanation, but from what I've read here in the past, in disks greater than 2T the number of sectors exceeds what can be represented in a drive's conventional partition table. 3T drives use a different table and one that our current uBoot does not understand. Thus, it cannot boot from a 3T drive, and indeed, even having such a drive connected at boot time will confuse it enough during its USB bus scan (remember, it's still looking through each partition for a bootable image, so it tries to read from every device attached) that it will be unable to even find a bootable image on another device.

The only ways I know to use a 3T drive on these devices are (1) to plug it in after the boot is complete and unplug it before a reboot, or (2) to reformat it as a 2T drive and waste the extra space.

(Admittedly, the above is somewhat dated. If anyone has a more recent take on this, I'd be interested in hearing it.)



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/14/2013 09:51PM by restamp.

Restamp is right: that the current uBoot does not understand 3TB drive. To use it with this uBoot, one must format it as a hybrid MBR. So 2 partitions, a small one and a larger one. uBoot will only see the 1st one, and the kernel will see both. I guess that's what isptrader tried to do.

The new uBoot I built recently can boot a 3TB GPT drive, but it needs to be flashed manually in Linux or in uBoot command line:
http://forum.doozan.com/read.php?3,12381,12381#msg-12381

isptrader: to make it work with your current uBoot, make sure the drive is setup as hybrid MBR. Some discussion here:
http://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=4967&p=27546&hilit=hybrid+mbr#p27546

-bodhi
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Thanks for the good info. I was able to boot off of a flash drive and mount the ext3 formatted 3TB drive
without a manual intervention. I don't remember now if I nixed my 4GB boot partition on the big drive or not. I'll give
your uboot a try next week if I didn't dump it. It's gonna take some time to digest those discussions anyway. :-)


-isptrader