S10 on x86, question about disk slicing

From: Rick Reineman (reineman1@llnl.gov)
Date: Thu Aug 11 2005 - 15:02:01 EDT


Just loaded my first x86 box, a Sun W1100z (Java Workstation). I've
observed what I consider odd disk slicing. I've done a little searching
around sun and sunsolve but nothing interesting popped up.

I normally wouldn't be too worried about something trivial like this.
My problem is this machine is going to a very remote site that is
expensive to send a human to, to fix a problem. I will either mirror
the boot disk, or occasionally just clone it. Cloning actually works
better for these remote systems. I need to understand what the disks
are doing, hence my problem.

I went through the standard Solaris10 GUI install. Got to the disk
partition page. The first page was what I assume was the fdisk page.
It had configs for DOS extended partitions, Linux parts, etc. I
configed for one big Solaris partition.

The next page was the typical slice the disk page, and I did what I
typically do for a system with lots of RAM:

0 root
1 /var
3 /export
4 swap
7 space in case I need a metadb for mirroring

What I got was nothing like what I selected in terms of cylinder layout.
  Slice 0 did not start on cylinder 0, in general things are all over
the place. Below is the VTOC from the disk.

* /dev/rdsk/c0d0s2 partition map
                  First Sector Last
* Partition Tag Flags Sector Count Sector Mount Directory
        0 2 00 3709440 11265408 14974847 /
        1 7 00 12096 2048256 2060351 /var
        2 5 00 0 156288384 156288383
        4 0 00 14974848 141313536 156288383 /export
        5 3 01 2661120 1048320 3709439 swap
        7 0 00 2060352 600768 2661119 (metadb)
        8 1 01 0 4032 4031
        9 9 01 4032 8064 12095

My gut reaction is to slice up the second disk the way I like it. Run a
ufsdump | ufsrestore routine, then run installboot. Tweak up vfstab and
reboot the machine.

I am worried that there's something about the x86 that I'm not
understanding and what I observed actually makes sense.

Thanks in advance for comments and opinions.

Rick

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rick Reineman                                         IT Systems Manager
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory - NAI/Q/CAS    reineman1@llnl.gov
_______________________________________________
sunmanagers mailing list
sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagers


This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Wed Apr 09 2008 - 23:31:17 EDT