Creating Soft Partitions

How to Create a Soft Partition

1. Check the Background Information About Soft Partitions.

2. Use one of the following methods to create a soft partition:

   • From the Enhanced Storage tool within the Solaris Management Console, open the Volumes node. Choose Action->Create Volume, then follow the instructions in the wizard. For more information, see the online help.

   • To create a soft partition, use the following form of the metainit command:

     metainit [-s set] soft-partition -p [-e] component size

     -s is used to specify which set is being used. If -s isn't specified, the local (default) disk set is used.

     -e is used to specify that the entire disk should be reformatted to provide a slice 0, taking most of the disk, and a slice 7 of a minimum of 4 Mbytes in size to contain a state database replica.

     soft-partition is the name of the soft partition. The name is of the form dnnn, where nnn is a number in the range of 0 to 8192.

     component is the disk, slice, or (logical) volume from which to create the soft partition. All existing data on the component is destroyed because the soft partition headers are written at the beginning of the component.

     size is the size of the soft partition, and is specified as a number followed by one of the following:

     • M or m for megabytes

     • G or g for gigabytes

     • T or t for terabyte

     • B or b for blocks (sectors)

   See the following examples and the metainit(1M) man page for more information.

Example—Creating a Soft Partition

# metainit d20 -p c1t3d0s2 4g

Example—Taking a Whole Disk for Soft Partitions

This example shows repartitioning disk c1t2d0, thus destroying any data on that disk, and creating a new soft partition on slice 0. The command looks like the following:

metainit d7 -p -e c1t2d0 1G