Re: Does solaris require disks to be zeroed before using

• Previous message: Cathy: "How do I setup Jumpstart server to handle mutiple interfaces"
• In reply to: Beardy: "Re: Does solaris require disks to be zeroed before using"
• Next in thread: Beardy: "Re: Does solaris require disks to be zeroed before using"
• Reply: Beardy: "Re: Does solaris require disks to be zeroed before using"
• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]

Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 21:52:59 GMT

Beardy wrote:
> David A.Lethe wrote:
>
>> On 23 Sep 2004 22:31:46 GMT, Scott Howard <scott@hunterlink.net.au>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> David A.Lethe <davidATsantools.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> This is causing some issues at our company, and we can't get any
>>>> definitive answers. Is there any requirement, or even best-practices
>>>> policies that SCSI and/or fibre channel disk drives need to have all
>>>> zeros written to them before partitioning and building a file system
>>>> on them?
>>>
>>>
>>> In a word, no.
>>>
>>> Solaris will never attempt to read a block of data which it hasn't
>>> previously written something to.
>>>
>>> Scott
>>
>>
>>
>> Not true, and this explains the whole point of the question.
>> Example .. .when you run the format command. Obviously it doesn't
>> write before reading, or every time you ran it, it would blow the
>> partitions away ;)
>
>
> OK format will check for the existence of a valid label on the disk
> first, and if not present, allow you to label the disk at that point.
> This is an exception, and I think the OP was referring to whether data
> blocks on disk should be zeroed, which they need not be; except in the
> unusual case that Casper referred to.
>
>> This brings up the reason for the question to begin with. The test
>> suites don't wipe the disks clean, and we had what might have been a
>> zillion-to-one shot where fdisk (on LINUX) exited with an invalid
>> partition error when the sysadmin tried to partition things.
>
>
> Your case is not relevant to the OP's question. The fact that the test
> suites may leave patterns on the disk is still not a problem. A random
> pattern and a regular pattern are identical if Solaris doesn't know they
> are there.
>
>> After I figured out problem wasn't hardware related, and using dd to
>> blow the first few MB of the disk away, we have to deal with problem
>> prevention ... do we adjust testing utilties to insure that all or
>> part of the disk is zeroed before we let people use the disks.
>
>
> Do what you feel is correct on Linux. This is not relevant to the OP's
> question, and to the correct answers that have been provided to him.
>

Who's the OP, if not David?

-- 
The e-mail address in our reply-to line is reversed in an attempt to
minimize spam.  Our true address is of the form che...@prodigy.net.

• Previous message: Cathy: "How do I setup Jumpstart server to handle mutiple interfaces"
• In reply to: Beardy: "Re: Does solaris require disks to be zeroed before using"
• Next in thread: Beardy: "Re: Does solaris require disks to be zeroed before using"
• Reply: Beardy: "Re: Does solaris require disks to be zeroed before using"
• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]