Creating Soft Partitions

How to Create a Soft Partition

Before You Begin

Check the Configuration Guidelines for Soft Partitions.

• Use one of the following methods to create a soft partition:

  • From the Enhanced Storage tool within the Solaris Management Console, open the Volumes node. Choose Action⇒Create Volume. Then, follow the instructions in the wizard. For more information, see the online help.

  • To create a soft partition, use the following form of the metainit command:

    # metainit [-s diskset] soft-partition -p [-e] component size

    -sdiskset

    Specifies which disk set is being used. If -s is not specified, the local (default) disk set is used.

    -p

    Specifies that a soft partition be configured.

    -e

    Specifies that the entire disk should be reformatted. Formatting the disk provides a slice 0, which takes most of the disk. Formatting the disk also provides a slice 7 of a minimum of 4 Mbytes in size. Slice 7 contains a state database replica.

    soft-partition

    Specifies the name of the soft partition. The name is of the form dnnn, where nnn is a number in a range between 0 and 8192.

    component

    Specifies the disk, slice, or logical volume from which to create the soft partition. All existing data on the component is destroyed because the soft partition headers are written at the beginning of the component.

    size

    Specifies the size of the soft partition. The size is specified as a number followed by one of the following:

    • M or m for megabytes

    • G or g for gigabytes

    • T or t for terabytes

    • B or b for blocks (sectors)

  See the following examples and the metainit(1M) man page for more information.

Example 13-1 Creating a Soft Partition

In the following example, a 4-Gbyte soft partition called d20 is created on c1t3d0s2.

# metainit d20 -p c1t3d0s2 4g

Example 13-2 Taking a Whole Disk for Soft Partitions

The following example creates a soft partition and formats disk c1t2d0. This action destroys any data on that disk and creates a new soft partition on slice 0.

# metainit d7 -p -e c1t2d0 1G