Format & Fdisk Demo (2 Minutes)

Description

This demo explains how to work with disk devices.

OpenSolaris Versions Supported

2008.05 or newer.

Points to Hit

The main thing you need to know about disk devices names is how to find out which disk devices are attached to your system.

Demo Prep

Clean up your /dev/dsk device list using pfexec devfsadm -C

Gotchas

None known.

Demo

Show all files in /dev/dsk by running ls -la /dev/dsk. Quite a mess

Run pfexec format which shows all disk devices. Much better!

bleonard@opensolaris:~$ pfexec format
Searching for disks...done

AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
0. c4d0 <DEFAULT cyl 15787 alt 2 hd 255 sec 63>
/pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,2/ide@0/cmdk@0,0
Specify disk (enter its number):

Enter the disk number and select fdisk. here you can see the partition containing OpenSolaris:

Specify disk (enter its number): 0
selecting c4d0
NO Alt slice
No defect list found
Total disk size is 24321 cylinders
Cylinder size is 16065 (512 byte) blocks

Cylinders
Partition   Status    Type          Start   End   Length    %
=========   ======    ============  =====   ===   ======   ===
1                 Other OS          0   882     883      4
2                 IFS: NTFS       883  8531    7649     31
3       Active    Solaris2       8532  24320    15789     65

Run iostat -En C4d0 (substituting your device name) to get more information on the disk device:

bleonard@opensolaris:~$ iostat -En c4d0
c4d0             Soft Errors: 0 Hard Errors: 0 Transport Errors: 0 
Model: Hitachi HTS7220 Revision:  Serial No: 070719DP0400DTG Size: 200.05GB <200047067136 bytes>
Media Error: 0 Device Not Ready: 0 No Device: 0 Recoverable: 0 
Illegal Request: 0

Demo Cleanup

None.

FormatFdiskDemo