Re: Does solaris require disks to be zeroed before using
From: Beardy (beardy_at_beardy.net)
Date: 09/25/04
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Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 06:00:46 +0000
CJT wrote:
> 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?
>
Oopers. Apols to OP.
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