slice limitations?

We made a 4-disk RAID 1+0 logical drive on a StorEdge 3310, labelled it, then newfs'd the entire drive (happens to be c2t0d0s2).

FWIW, the partition table looks like:

PartTagFlagCylinders SizeBlocks

0rootwm0 -32130.97MB(33/0/0)268224

1swapwu33 -65130.97MB(33/0/0)268224

2backupwu0 - 35147136.22GB(35148/0/0) 285682944

3 unassignedwm00 (0/0/0) 0

4 unassignedwm00 (0/0/0) 0

5 unassignedwm00 (0/0/0) 0

6usrwm66 - 35147135.97GB(35082/0/0) 285146496

7 unassignedwm00 (0/0/0) 0

Our customer had a consultant come in and say we weren't supposed to be using s2, that it would cause problems. Could there be any truth to that? I think this person was confused with the behavior of the internal system disk, and perhaps confused by the default label names themselves. And of *course* we can use the full partition (s2) of the logical drive!

Thanks for any clarification!

Brandon

[970 byte] By [bfc1964] at [2007-11-25 23:00:19]

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# 1

Slice number 2 is reserved to include all cylinders of the disk so the cylinders can be referenced as one unit.

mlennon at 2007-7-5 17:49:37 >

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# 2

Thnx, but does that mean its dangerous or unreliable to make a a filesystem using that slice?

bfc1964 at 2007-7-5 17:49:37 >

# 3

hallo,for convention the slice 2 represent the entire disk.you can use it but is a good pratic to create another slice big as the slice 2 and use it.

LucaViesti at 2007-7-5 17:49:37 >

# 4

It's not a good idea to use slice to for a filesystem, in my opinion. Volume managers like Veritas use the VTOC, which is stored on slice 2, for disk managment information. If that slice becomes corrupt or damaged, you will loose the entire disk. There are more details in the prtvtoc man page. Did you ask the consultant person what their opinion was?

mlennon at 2007-7-5 17:49:37 >

# 5

You should NEVER use slice 2.

Its realky bad practice.

There is a reason you cant chage it.

Any slice you cant change should be ringing alarm bells.

The other partitions are simple and easy to modify via format to setp up any way you want.

Its all ways a good idea to remove the partitions on the disk you are not using to provide simple and clear disk and system admin.

remember Keep It Simple.

see best practices...

The last thing you want to do is loose or corrupt data.

theengineerwhogotaway at 2007-7-5 17:49:37 >

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