Re: Does solaris require disks to be zeroed before using

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Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 15:26:14 +0100

On Saturday 25 September 2004 7:17 am in comp.sys.sun.admin Beardy wrote:

>> The only case where Solaris needs a disk to be zeroed is
>> where an IDE disk has been installed on a system/OS version
>> which does not support large drives. In this case only the
>> boot block needs to be zeroed.
>> This was a common issue with the Ultra5/10 when a user installed
>> a large disk which was not correctly recognised.
>>
>
> Chris, I'm curious - didn't they just patch/upgrade the OS to support
> the large disk? I can't see how zeroing the boot block would help...

When you first initialise a disk, format writes a disk label to
cylinder zero. The size of the disk is contained in the label and
is believed from that point.

This means that if you first initialise a disk with a version
of solaris which does not support large IDE drives the disk will
be recognised as being too small, even if you re-install the
correct version of solaris.

The only cure is to zero the disk label with dd and start again
using the correct solaris version.

-- 
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