x86: Guidelines for Creating an fdisk Partition

Follow these guidelines when you set up one or more fdisk partitions.

• The fdisk command cannot be used on disks with an EFI label that are greater than 1 terabyte in size.

• The disk can be divided into a maximum of four fdisk partitions. One of partitions must be a Solaris partition.

• The Solaris partition must be made the active partition on the disk. The active partition is partition whose operating system will be booted by default at system startup.

• Solaris fdisk partitions must begin on cylinder boundaries.

• Solaris fdisk partitions must begin at cylinder 1, not cylinder 0, on the first disk because additional boot information, including the master boot record, is written in sector 0.

• The Solaris fdisk partition can be the entire disk. Or, you might want to make it smaller to allow room for a DOS partition. You can also make a new fdisk partition on a disk without disturbing existing partitions (if sufficient space is available) to create a new partition.

Solaris slices are also called partitions. Certain interfaces might refer to a slice as a partition.

fdisk partitions are supported only on x86 based systems. To avoid confusion, Solaris documentation tries to distinguish between fdisk partitions and the entities within the Solaris fdisk partition. These entities might be called slices or partitions.