System Administration Guide: Basic Administration

Partition or Slice Tables (format.dat)

A partition table in the format.dat file defines a slice table for a specific disk type.

The partition keyword in the format.dat file is assigned the name of the slice table. Enclose the name in double quotation marks to preserve any white space in the name. The following table describes the identifiers that must be assigned values in all slice tables.

Table 36–9 Required Identifiers for Slice Tables

Identifier 

Description 

disk

The name of the disk_type that this slice table is defined for. This name must appear exactly as it does in the disk_type definition.

ctlr

The disk controller type that this slice table can be attached to. Currently, the supported values are ATA for ATA controllers and SCSI for SCSI controllers. The controller type that is specified here must also be defined for the disk_type that you specified in the disk_type definition.

The other identifiers in a slice definition describe the actual slice information. The identifiers are the numbers 0 through 7. These identifiers are optional. Any slice that is not explicitly assigned is set to 0 length. The value of each of these identifiers is a pair of numbers separated by a comma. The first number is the starting cylinder for the slice, and the second is the number of sectors in the slice. The following are some examples of slice definitions:


partition = "SUN1.3G" \
        : disk = "SUN1.3G" : ctlr = SCSI \
        : 0 = 0, 34000 : 1 = 25, 133280 : 2 = 0, 2672400 : 6 = 123, 2505120

partition = "SUN2.1G" \
        : disk = "SUN2.1G" : ctlr = SCSI \
        : 0 = 0, 62320 : 1 = 41, 197600 : 2 = 0, 4154160 : 6 = 171, 3894240

partition = "SUN2.9G" \
        : disk = "SUN2.9G" : ctlr = SCSI \
        : 0 = 0, 195426 : 1 = 94, 390852 : 2 = 0, 5683986 : 6 = 282, 5097708