Determining Which Slices to Use

When you set up file systems for a disk, you choose not only the size of each slice but which slices to use. Your decisions depend on the configuration of the system and the software you want to install on the disk.

You can set up five system configurations:

•  Servers

•  Diskless clients

•  Stand-alone systems

•  Dataless clients

•  Solstice AutoClient systems.

Each system configuration requires the use of different slices, as listed in Table 3-14.

Disk Use Check (du)

To find the number of 512-byte disk blocks used per file or directory, type du and press Return. When directories contain subdirectories, the subdirectories and their contents are included in the block count:

oak% du
2913    ./3.Øtemplates
639     ./Art
347     ./Howto
1998    ./Clipart
6Ø7     ./Newtemplates
38      ./Modemstuff
2ØØ4    ./Config/Art
6593    ./Config
1328Ø   .
oak%

The output is displayed in 512-byte blocks. To convert to megabytes, divide by 2048. In this example 13280/2048 = 6.48 Mbytes.

Disk Information Check (prtvtoc)

Use the prtvtoc (print volume table of contents) command to display information about disk partitioning. The prtvtoc command works only when the slice you specify has space allocated to it. Otherwise, it displays the error message No such device or address. If you use the standard slice-naming conventions, specifying slice 2 displays the contents of the entire disk.

Follow these steps to display information about disk partitioning:

1.  Become superuser.

2.  Type prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/cntndnsn and press Return. Information for the disk you specify is displayed:

oak% su
Password:
oak# prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/cØt1dØs2
* /dev/rdsk/cØt1dØs2 partition map
*
* Dimensions:
*     512 bytes/sector
*      35 sectors/track
*       6 tracks/cylinder
*     21Ø sectors/cylinder
*    1Ø19 cylinders
*     974 accessible cylinders
*
* Flags:
*   1: unmountable
*  1Ø: read-only
*
*                        First
* Partition  Tag  Flags    Sector
      Ø      Ø    ØØ          Ø
      1      Ø    ØØ      2415Ø
      2      Ø    ØØ          Ø
      6      Ø    ØØ      7455Ø
Sector    Last
Count    Sector  Mount Directory
2415Ø     24149
5Ø4ØØ     74549
2Ø454Ø    2Ø4539   /
12999Ø    2Ø4539
oak#

Bad-Disk Repair

The following sections describe the steps for repairing a bad disk or reinstalling a new one.

Try Archiving the Files

If you can access the drive, do a ufsdump of all the file systems on the disk. See Chapter 4, "Administering File Systems," for information on how to use the ufsdump command.