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I thought I would share the steps I took to setup CentOS 5.1 on a Dell PowerEdge 1900 withPerc 5/i and 6/750GB hard drives in a RAID 5 configuration.

1. Setup your RAID arrays:
   • OS VD: Using the Perc 5/i configuration utility, remove all existing arrays (If new from factory), then setup the first virtual disk (VD0) as a RAID 5 using all drives (right all of them), then specify the volume size. In my case, I chose to allocate 120GB (122880 MB). This is where I’m going to install the OS.
   • Data VD: You’ll want to setup a second virtual disk as a RAID 5 with all of the disks selected and allocate the remaining disk to it. When you continue to the OS install, the installer will see SDA (VD 0) and SDB (VD 1) for the partitions.
2. I won’t go into on how you should setup CentOS since that’s not the point of this article. During the OS install, make sure that you choose SDA for the OS, leave SDB alone.
3. Once you have your OS installed, you’ll want to use parted to complete the steps.
   • $ parted /dev/sdb print
   • The disk label type should print as msdos
   • $ mklabel gpt
   • $ mkpart primary ext3 0 3619GB
   • $ print
   • If you see gpt and you see the following output, then you can quit (below is an example):
   • Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name  Flags
     1      17.4kB  3619GB   3619GB               DATA
4. Now for the fun part, you need to make the filesystem, this can be done using the command below
   • $ mkf.ext3 /dev/sdb1
5. Sit back and relax because this step will take a little while. Once it is done, you can mount the new partition anywhere. In my case, I mounted it on /home:
   • mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 /home
6. At this point, if you run $ df -h /home, it would show you something like 3.1TB available.

Enjoy!