Restrictions of the EFI Disk Label

Keep the following restrictions in mind when determining whether to use disks greater than 1 terabyte is appropriate for your environment:

• The layered software products intended for systems with EFI-labeled disks might be incapable of accessing a disk with an EFI disk label.

• A disk with an EFI disk label is not recognized on systems running previous Solaris releases.

• The EFI disk label is not supported on IDE disks.

• You cannot boot from a disk with an EFI disk label.

• You cannot use the Solaris Management Console's Disk Manager Tool to manage disks with EFI labels. Use the format utility or the Solaris Management Console's Enhanced Storage Tool to manage disks with EFI labels, after you use the format utility to partition the disk.

• The EFI specification prohibits overlapping slices. The whole disk is represented by cxtydz.

• UFS file systems are compatible with the EFI disk label. Starting in the Solaris 9 8/03 release, you can create a UFS file system that is greater than 1 terabyte. For more information multiterabyte UFS file systems, see SPARC: Support of Multiterabyte UFS File Systems.

  The unbundled Sun QFS file system is also available if you need to create file systems greater than 1 terabyte. For information on the Sun QFS file system, see http://docs.sun.com/db/doc/816-2542-10.

• Provides information about disk or partition sizes in sectors and blocks, but not in cylinders and heads.

• The following format options are either not supported or are not applicable on disks with EFI labels:

  • The save option is not supported because disks with EFI labels do not need an entry in the format.dat file.

  • The backup option is not applicable because the disk driver finds the primary label and writes it back to the disk.