Editing Solaris 10 System Administration Part I (section)

=== disk labels & partition tables ===

disk slices are groups of cylinders used to organize data

typically, administrators will use slices to organize data by function so a slice may store user's home directories, binaries, swap space, or system files

a beginning & ending cylinder define each slice

# of cylinders determines the size of a slice

A disk label is a defined area of disk space used to store information about disk controller, geometry, & slices

A disk label also contains a partition table which holds partition, cylinder, & slice information

Label a disk = write slice info to disk [label a disk after changes are made]

Solaris 10 supports two disk labels
* Sun Microsystems, Inc (SMI) disk label
** SPARC-based Solaris OS
** SPARC volume table of contents (VTOC) label for disks (SMI VTOC)
** supports disks <1 terabyte in size
** resides in 1st sector of disk on SPARC
** includes partition table which enables you to define 0-7 disk partitions (slices)
*** slice 2 represents entire disk
*** slice 2 maintains important data regarding entire disk, like total # cylinders, size of total disk
** Must be used for SPARC-based & Solaris x86/x64-based systems boot disks
** Solaris x86/x64-based systems maintain two partition tables on each disk
*** 1st sector contains a fixed disk (fdisk) partition table
*** 2nd sector contains partition table with slice info within Solaris fdisk partition
** fdisk partition defines up to four fdisk partitions
* extensible firmware interface (EFI) disk label
** supports disks >1 terabyte in size on 64-bit kernel
** supports virtual disk volumes
** partition table defines 0-9 disk partitions (slices)
** compatible with UFS & can create UFS >1 terabyte
** Solaris OS systems do not currently boot from disks using EFI labels

<insert some pics of physical disks>