GPT for good

Just tonight, my friend and I were tinkering with two new hard drives (4TB each) on Dell PowerEdge T320. The box was already configured with 4 500GB drives on RAID5 for system parititons (boot, swap, root for Centos) and 2TB drives for data.

Putting in the new drives was pretty self-explanatory: open the bay, plug them in, open the system setup (press F2 upon system boot), and make your way with virtual drives. I configured the two 4TB drives in RAID0 as a single drive. This was just the beginning...

1. initialized the 8TB drive with DOS partition table,
2. ran cfdisk, made a single LVM2 partition with "100%" capacity (I was just hitting 'Enter' repeatedly :D ) and didn't bother to double check its actual size after partitioning,
3. pvcreate,
4. vgextend,
5. lvextend (to the 2TB 'data' partition),
6. found out that the resulting partition is only 4TB,
7. found out that additional LVM physical volume was only 2TB big,
8. vgreduce: failed,
9. ...
10. ...
11. more screwing up
12. ...
13. ...
14. yanked out the new drives,
15. reboot: broken volume group,
16. removed the broken logical volume from broken volume group,
17. realized that only GPT can handle partition larger than 2TB
18. redoing everything with GPT: disklabel with parted, pvcreate, vgextend,  mkfs,
19. ...
20. working 10TB partition