[SunHELP] Disk Layout Issues...

[Michael Vang]

David Goldsobel wrote:
> 
> Is it possible to put in a drive bigger than 20GB? According to the
> folks at Sun my ultra 10 can only handle drives up to 20 GB? I would
> love to know because I wanted to put up an FTP server and need more
> storage.
> Sorry to answer your question with a question
> David

The solaris FAQ says:

5.63) I have a problem with large disk drives.

    Various releases of Solaris have different upper limits in the
    size of the IDE disks they support.  For SCSI, there are
    really no such limits, though older versions of format do
    not support really large raids.

    All releases support IDE disks <= 8GB; support for those
    disks is primarily a BIOS issue on Intel.

    Support for IDE disks between 8 and 32 GB was added in Solaris
7/SPARC
    and Solaris 8/Intel.  Note the difference in release between
    architectures.

    Support for IDE disks over 32 GB was added to Solaris 8 10/00
    for both SPARC and Intel.

    Solaris releases that support IDE disks upto 8GB will truncate
    larger disks to 8GB.  To use such disks to the max after upgrading
    to a later release of Solaris/SPARC requires zeroing the disk label
    with dd before relabeling it.

    Solaris releases that support disks between 8GB and 32 GB will
    truncate the disk to "real size modulo 32GB".  I.e., a 40GB or 72GB
    disk becomes a 8GB one, a 33GB or 65GB disk becomes 1GB, etc.

    SPARC/IDE systems have no OpenBoot issues with disks over 8GB
    and can boot fine from beyond the 8GB/32GB mark.

    Solaris/Intel didn't support IDE disks > 8GB until release 8;
    BIOS permitting, Solaris 8 can even boot from beyond the 8GB mark.
    Older Solaris/Intel releases have a hard time coping with such
    big disks.

The most recently posted version of the FAQ is available from
<http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2/>


Mike