Very Computer

Hi Experts,

the Solaris documentation says, that slice 2 of any disk doesn't contain
a filesystem.
It represents the whole disk.
What is the reason for that? I configured a Solaris 2.7 system putting
/usr into slice 2.
It works fine. Is there a risk?

Thanks a lot for your help!

Heiko

Quote:

>the Solaris documentation says, that slice 2 of any disk doesn't contain
>a filesystem.
>It represents the whole disk.
>What is the reason for that?

It's a convention, like using slice 1 for swap. It's not mandatory.

Quote:>                             I configured a Solaris 2.7 system putting
>/usr into slice 2.
>It works fine. Is there a risk?

The risk is someone assuming that they can copy the disk by

  dd if=/dev/rdsk/c*t*d*s2 of=/dev/rdsk/c#t#d#s2 bs=[something big]

without checking first.

On the whole, it's a good idea to stick to the convention unless you have
an urgent need to use all 8 slices.

Chris Thompson
Email: cet1 [at] cam.ac.uk

Another one is that prtvtoc assumes slice 2 is not a real slice
when working out unused space on the disk, so it will report the
space occupied by slice 2 as free.

Quote:>On the whole, it's a good idea to stick to the convention unless you have
>an urgent need to use all 8 slices.

...or all 16 slices on Solaris x86.

--
Andrew Gabriel
Consultant Software Engineer