[geeks] Raw disk access under Solaris

[JP Hindin]

On Tue, 6 Sep 2016, Jonathan Katz wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 6, 2016 at 3:22 PM, JP Hindin <jplist2008 at kiwigeek.com> wrote:
>> Mornin' all, hopefully you (US'ns at least) had relaxing long weekends;
>
> I only had a long weekend in Belgium because I'm sick :( Anyway, here
> is what you may be running into.
>
> Your disk is NOT a Sun disk. Therefore it likely does NOT have a Sun
> (BSD) disk label. That means the c#t0d0s2 doesn't "exist" and that it
> won't cover the whole disk. When you run the "format" command and
> point at at this disk, does it say "Corrupt Disk or NO Sun disk label"
> (or a similar error?) That's your issue. That said I'm not sure what
> the right way is to image the whole disk in this instance. Do you get
> any love from "prtvtoc" on the drive?

Hmz, apparently I didn't make this belief clear enough in my original 
eMail - I'm also very certain this is precisely what is happening. Solaris 
provides appropriate 'invalid disk label' errors on boot and a prtvtoc 
very much has no interest in working with the drive.

The disk is from a Cray J90, it is very, very definitely not partitioned 
in any way that Solaris is going to understand - that being said, it's 
just a string of bytes from one end of the drive to the other, partition 
maps are irrelevant to the data that's on the disk. Under Linux I'd just 
do a 'dd if=/dev/sdc ...' and all would be well.
I simply don't know the Solaris mechanism to accomplish this.

Feel better Jonathan;

  - JP