Restrictions of the EFI Disk Label

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

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

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

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

• On x86-based systems, you can use the fdisk command on a disk with an EFI label that is greater than 2 TB in size.

• You cannot use the Solaris Management Console's Disk Manager tool to manage disks with EFI labels. Use the format utility to partition disks with EFI labels. Then, you can use the Solaris Management Console's Enhanced Storage Tool to manage volumes and disk sets with EFI-labeled disks.

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

• The EFI disk label 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.