HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen 8 - Hard Drive Configuration?

I have a HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen 8 box. I installed a 4tb drive and created a simple array. The raid controller saw the entire drive. I then used IP 6.1 to install Windows Server 2012 Standard. IP only created a 2TB partition. I though no big deal, once OS gets installed I will extended or create a new partition with the additional 1.8tb.

After everything was installed, I jump in to disk manager and the additional space is shown as unallocated space, however... I can not extended the volume, nor can I create a new partition with the existing space.

So, I turn smart array off, turn on AHCI standard mode and started to install and WS2012 and while it saw two partitions, it would fail when creating the partition for the installation. So I took the drive out, moved it to a new machine, deleted all partitions and began windows 7 install. Windows 7 saw the 4tb, however it could not create a partition on the disk as well "FAILED TO CREATE SYSTEM PARTITION".

I'm new to HP Proliant servers. I work with Dell servers at work where you load a simple Raid drive during the install and your done. But here I'm a bit confused.

Can someone with more experienced with HP servers offer a bit of advice on how I can properly install a 4tb drive as the primary OS drive? Is it possible? I'm sure it is, but my lack of knowledge stops me.

Thanks.

Solution 1:

Depending on the RAID controller installed in the server (I'm assuming Smart Array), you can carve an array (a group of physical disks) into multiple logical drives (virtual disks with a RAID level setting).

Using the HP Smart Storage Administrator tool, create an array comprised of the 4TB disk(s), then a logical drive that's an appropriate size for your OS (e.g. 120GB). From there, you can create one or more additional logical drives to fill the rest of the array's capacity.

Solution 2:

That's not an HP issue, it's a 32 bit integer issue, which makes a 2TB drive the largest drive supported when using 512 byte sectors.

To use the full capacity of the drive, you'll want to format it as a GPT drive... and probably not want to use it as your system partition, but if you do decide to use a 4 TB disk as your system partition anyway, you need to be using EFI hardware and have your server set to EFI boot mode (rather than legacy BIOS boot mode).