x86: Guidelines for Creating an fdisk Partition (System Administration Guide: Basic Administration)

System Administration Guide: Basic Administration

x86: Guidelines for Creating an `fdisk` Partition

Follow these guidelines when you set up the fdisk partition.

The disk can be divided into a maximum of four fdisk partitions. One of partitions must be a Solaris partition.
The Solaris partition must be made the active partition on the disk. The active partition is partition whose operating system will be booted by default at system startup.
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 might 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).

x86 only –

Solaris slices are sometimes called partitions. This book uses the term slice, but some Solaris documentation and programs might refer to a slice as a partition.

To avoid confusion, Solaris documentation tries to distinguish between fdisk partitions (which are supported only on Solaris (Intel Platform Edition)) and the divisions within the Solaris fdisk partition, which might be called slices or partitions.