Editing Solaris 10 System Administration Part I (section)

== Extended Volume Table of Contents ==

prior to Solaris 10 10/09 release the Sun disk label limited the size of bootable disk to <1 TB. Now <2 TB is supported with 64--bit Solaris kernel

Extended VTOC feature is available after standard installation of Solaris 10 10/09

No support for >1 TB disks on Solaris 32-bit kernel

Prior to Solaris 10 10/09 Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) label was always used for a >1 TB disk

VTOC label is extended to any size disk, but addressable space in VTOC is limited to <2 TB

=== Features of the new Extended VTOC ===

* fdisk utility works on >1 TB disks on x86 systems, Up to 2 TB partitions in Master Boot Record (MBR) for non-EFI partition types.
* format -e utility is used to label a disk of any size with VTOC label. Addressable space is limited to 2 TB
* when fdisk utility is run on >2 TB disk a warning message is displayed indicating that a non-EFI partition >2 TB cannot be created

=== Extended VTOC Requirements & Dependencies ===

* Supported by x86 (64-bit) & SPARC & utilizes the Newboot feature
* Works with target & HBA drivers that support disks >1 TB
* DAD & IDE on SPARC & PCMCIA on x86 systems do not support disks >1 TB