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System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 Information Library |
1. Managing Removable Media (Overview)
2. Managing Removable Media (Tasks)
3. Accessing Removable Media (Tasks)
4. Writing CDs and DVDs (Tasks)
5. Managing Devices (Overview/Tasks)
6. Dynamically Configuring Devices (Tasks)
7. Using USB Devices (Overview)
9. Using InfiniBand Devices (Overview/Tasks)
What's New in Disk Management?
Multiple Disk Sector Size Support
Two-Terabyte Disk Support for Installing and Booting the Oracle Solaris OS
iSNS Support in the Solaris iSCSI Target and Initiator
x86: Disk Management in the GRUB Boot Environment
Support for SCSI Disks That are Larger Than 2 Terabytes
Where to Find Disk Management Tasks
Comparison of the EFI Label and the VTOC Label
Restrictions of the EFI Disk Label
Support for EFI-Labeled Disks on x86 Systems
Installing a System With an EFI-Labeled Disk
Managing Disks With EFI Disks Labels
Troubleshooting Problems With EFI Disk Labels
Slice Arrangements on Multiple Disks
Determining Which Slices to Use for UFS File Systems
When to Use the format Utility
Guidelines for Using the format Utility
11. Administering Disks (Tasks)
12. SPARC: Setting Up Disks (Tasks)
13. x86: Setting Up Disks (Tasks)
14. Configuring Oracle Solaris iSCSI Targets and Initiators (Tasks)
15. The format Utility (Reference)
16. Managing File Systems (Overview)
17. Creating and Mounting File Systems (Tasks)
18. Using The CacheFS File System (Tasks)
19. Configuring Additional Swap Space (Tasks)
20. Checking UFS File System Consistency (Tasks)
21. UFS File System (Reference)
22. Backing Up and Restoring UFS File Systems (Overview)
23. Backing Up UFS Files and File Systems (Tasks)
24. Using UFS Snapshots (Tasks)
25. Restoring UFS Files and File Systems (Tasks)
26. UFS Backup and Restore Commands (Reference)
27. Copying Files and File Systems (Tasks)
The format utility is most often used by system administrators to partitioning a disk. The steps are as follows:
Determining which slices are needed
Determining the size of each slice or partition
Using the format utility to partition the disk
Labeling the disk with new partition information
Creating the file system for each partition
The easiest way to partition a disk is to use the modify command from the partition menu of the format utility. The modify command allows you to create partitions by specifying the size of each partition without having to keep track of the starting cylinder boundaries. The modify command also keeps tracks of any disk space that remains in the “free hog” slice.
An important part of the disk label is the partition table. The partition table identifies a disk's slices, the slice boundaries (in cylinders), and the total size of the slices. You can display a disk's partition table by using the format utility. The following describes partition table terminology.
Table 10-6 Partition Table Terminology
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Partition flags and tags are assigned by convention and require no maintenance.
For more information on displaying the partition table, see the following references:
The following format utility output shows an example of a partition table from a 74-GB disk with a VTOC label displayed:
Total disk cylinders available: 38756 + 2 (reserved cylinders) Part Tag Flag Cylinders Size Blocks 0 root wm 3 - 2083 4.00GB (2081/0/0) 8390592 1 swap wu 2084 - 3124 2.00GB (1041/0/0) 4197312 2 backup wm 0 - 38755 74.51GB (38756/0/0) 156264192 3 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0 4 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0 5 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0 6 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0 7 home wm 3125 - 38755 68.50GB (35631/0/0) 143664192 8 boot wu 0 - 0 1.97MB (1/0/0) 4032 9 alternates wu 1 - 2 3.94MB (2/0/0) 8064 partition>
The partition table displayed by the format utility contains the following information.
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The following is an example of an EFI disk label displayed by using the prtvtoc command.
# prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/c4t1d0s0 * /dev/rdsk/c4t1d0s0 partition map * * Dimensions: * 512 bytes/sector * 2576941056 sectors * 2576940989 accessible sectors * * Flags: * 1: unmountable * 10: read-only * * First Sector Last * Partition Tag Flags Sector Count Sector Mount Directory 0 2 00 34 629145600 629145633 1 4 00 629145634 629145600 1258291233 6 4 00 1258291234 1318633404 2576924637 8 11 00 2576924638 16384 2576941021
The output of the prtvtoc command provides information in the following three sections:
Dimensions
Flags
Partition Table
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When you use the format utility to change the size of one or more disk slices, you designate a temporary slice that will expand and shrink to accommodate the resizing operations.
This temporary slice donates, or “frees,” space when you expand a slice, and receives, or “hogs,” the discarded space when you shrink a slice. For this reason, the donor slice is sometimes called the free hog.
The free hog slice exists only during installation or when you run the format utility. There is no permanent free hog slice during day-to-day operations.
For information on using the free hog slice, see the following sections: