This section covers disk configuration tasks such as formatting, labeling, or partitioning disks. Disks are typically formatted and configured by the manufacturers and the default configurations are generally sufficient. However, disk configuration might be required on certain circumstances such as disk corruption and recovery.
Note that configuring a disk such as formatting would destroy existing data on the disk. Relabeling would remove existing partition information. Make sure to perform the necessary backups to ensure that no data loss occurs if you reconfigure a disk.
Procedures to configure disks on both SPARC based and x86 based systems have similar steps. However, with x86 based systems, you use the fdisk option of the Format utility for disk operations.
To configure a disk, the disk must be inactive. Thus, if the disk to be configured contains Oracle Solaris, then you must boot from a different media. For more information about booting Oracle Solaris systems, see topics on booting from a local media or from the network in Booting and Shutting Down Oracle Solaris 11.3 Systems.