x86: Guidelines for Creating an fdisk Partition

Follow these guidelines when setting up the fdisk partition.

• The disk can be divided into a maximum of four fdisk partitions. One of these partitions must be a Solaris partition.

• The Solaris partition must be made the active partition on the disk. The active partition is the one whose operating system will be booted by default at system start-up.

• Solaris fdisk partitions must begin on cylinder boundaries.

• Solaris fdisk partitions must begin at cylinder 1, not cylinder 0, on the first disk because additional boot information, including the master boot record, is written in sector 0.

• The Solaris fdisk partition can be the entire disk or you may want to make it smaller to allow room for a DOS partition. You can also make a new fdisk partition on a disk without disturbing existing partitions (if there is enough room to create a new one).

Solaris slices are sometimes called partitions. This user guide uses the term slice, but some Solaris documentation and programs may refer to a slice as a partition. To avoid confusion, Solaris documentation tries to distinguish between fdisk partitions (which are supported only on Solaris^TM (Intel Platform Edition) and the divisions within the Solaris fdisk partition, which may be called slices or partitions.