Two-Terabyte Disk Support for Installing and Booting the Solaris OS (System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems)

System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems

Two-Terabyte Disk Support for Installing and Booting the Solaris OS

Solaris Express Community Edition, build 99: In previous Solaris releases, you could not install and boot the Solaris OS from a disk that was greater than 1 Tbyte in size. In the SXCE build 99 release, you can install and boot the Solaris OS from a disk that is up to 2 Tbytes in size. In previous releases, you also had to use an EFI label for a disk that is larger than 1 Tbytes. In this release, you can use the VTOC label on any size disk, but the addressable space by the VTOC is limited to 2 Tbytes.

The Solaris disk drivers and disk utilities have been updated to provide the following support:

Installing and booting the Solaris OS on a two-terabyte disk must be connected to a system that runs a 64-bit kernel, with a minimum of 1 Gbyte of memory.
You can use the format -e utility to label a disk of any size with a VTOC label, but the addressable space is limited to 2 Tbytes.
The default label that is used by the format utility and the installation software for a disk that is less than 2 Tbytes in size is a VTOC label.
You can use the fdisk utility on a disk that is greater than 1 Tbyte on x86 systems. Support is added for up to 2-Tbyte partitions in the MBR for non-EFI partition types. This support means that Solaris partitions can go up to 2 Tbytes. Other non-EFI partitions may be subject to a limit depending on partition type.

When the fdisk utility is run on a disk that is greater than 2 Tbytes in size, a warning message is displayed to indicate that you cannot create a non-EFI partition that is greater than 2 Tbytes.
The Solaris Volume Manager software has been modified to create metadevices that support physical disks with VTOC labels up to 2 Tbytes in size.

Keep in mind that you cannot move a disk over 1 Tbyte with a legacy MBR or a legacy VTOC to a previous Solaris release. EFI labeled disks continue to work as in previous Solaris releases.

For more information about the EFI label changes in this release, see EFI Disk Label.