Hi
I want to mirror a boot disk on Solaris 9 Sparc. All slices have file systems on them. Do I need to reformat the disk to make slices available or is there another way? I read some where about reclaiming space from swap but I'm not sure how this creates another slice unless they meant to take the space from swap and add it to a free slice if there wasn't enough space on the free slice.
You're stuck. This is one of the reasons why it is best practice to put all of Solaris on one slice, maybe with a 2nd one for /var.
Your best bet is to consolidate /opt or /var into each other or the root filesystem. You will need to do that in single user mode.
You can also run without a swap slice if you have plenty of memory on the machine and don't need savecore enabled. At least, you can run without swap temporarily and use the slice as a buffer for your consolidation efforts.
Well, you *can* share a slice with a replica and a metadevice. But maintenance of that is really annoying.
If you must, you could do this:
#1 disable swap
#2 put a replica (or replicas) on the swap slice
#3 Create a metadevice on the same slice
#4 Create a mirror metadevice pointing at the one in #3 (if you want)
#5 Enable swap on the mirror metadevice.
You lose some flexibility with this arrangement, but it is functional.
It doesn't have to be swap, but that's the only slice that you can easily shrink/dice whatever on most machines.
--
Darren