Hard drive device name on Solaris
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/78336
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09-06-2019 - |
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I need to figure out the hard drive name for a solaris box and it is not clear to me what the device name is. On linux, it would be something like /dev/hda or /dev/sda, but on solaris I am getting a bit lost in the partitions and what the device is called. I think that entries like /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0 are the partitions, how is the whole hard drive referenced?
Solution
/dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0 means Controller 0, SCSI target (ID) 0, and s means Slice (partition) 0.
Typically, by convention, s2 is the entire disk. This partition overlaps with the other partitions.
prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0 will show you the partition table for the disk, to make sure.
OTHER TIPS
What do you want to do to the whole disk? Look at the EXAMPLES section of the man page for the command in question to see how much of a disk name the command requires.
zpool doesn't require a partition, as in: c0t0d0 newfs does: c0t0d0s0 dd would use the whole disk partition: c0t0d0s2
Note: s2 as the entire disk is just a convention. A root user can use the Solaris format command and change the extent of any of the partitions.
If you run Solaris on non SPARC hardware and don't use EFI, the whole hard drive is not c0t0d0s2 but c0t0d0p0, s2 is in that case just the Solaris primary partition.
There are two types for disk label, one is SMI(vtoc), the other is GPT(EFI).
On X86 platform and the disk is SMI labeled(default behavior): cXtXdXp0 is the whole physical disk cXtXdXp1-cXtXdXp4 are primary partitions, included the solaris partitions.
cXtXdXs0-cXtXdXs8 are the partitions(slices) of the activate Solaris partitions. cXtXdXs2 is the whole activate Solaris partition, maybe not the whole disk.
Hope I am clear.
/Meng
The comments about slice 2 are only correct for drives with an SMI label.
If the drive is greater than 1TB, or if the drive has been used for ZFS, the drive will have an EFI label and slice 2 will NOT be the entire disk. With an EFI label, slice 2 is "just another slice". You would then refer to the whole disk by using the device name without a slice, e.g. c0t0d0.
c0t0d0s0 is the entire drive. The breakdown is:
/dev/[r]dsk/c C t A d0s S
...where C is the controller number, A is the SCSI address, and S is the "slice". Slice 0 is the whole disk; the other slices are the partition numbers.
See this for more info.
cXtYdZs2 is the whole drive. period.
