Dividing a Disk Into Slices

The format utility is most often used by system administrators to divide a disk into slices. The steps are:

• Determining which slices are needed

• Determining the size of each slice

• Using the format utility to divide the disk into slices

• Labeling the disk with new slice information

• Creating the file system for each slice

The easiest way to divide a disk into slices is to use the modify command from the partition menu. The modify command allows you to create slices by specifying the size of each slice in megabytes without having to keep track of starting cylinder boundaries. It also keeps tracks of any disk space remainder in the "free hog" slice.

Using the Free Hog Slice

When you use the format utility to change the size of one or more disk slices, you designate a temporary slice that will expand and shrink to accommodate the resizing operations.

This temporary slice donates, or "frees," space when you expand a slice, and receives, or "hogs," the discarded space when you shrink a slice. For this reason, the donor slice is sometimes called the free hog.

The donor slice exists only during installation or when you run the format utility. There is no permanent donor slice during day-to-day, normal operations.

See "SPARC: How to Create Disk Slices and Label a Disk" or "IA: How to Create Disk Slices and Label a Disk" for information on using the free hog slice.