How do I find out how many data cylinders a disk has?

UNIX Solaris
1

I recently installed two new hard drives onto an OpenSolaris v5.11 machine. I need to format the two disks.

I tried the format command. It asks me for the number of data cylinders and alternate cylinders.... <see below>

admin@minime-28:/dev/rdsk# format
Searching for disks...done

AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
0. c4d0 <DEFAULT cyl 60797 alt 2 hd 255 sec 63>
/pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,2/ide@0/cmdk@0,0
1. c4d1 <drive type unknown>
/pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,2/ide@0/cmdk@1,0
2. c5d0 <drive type unknown>
/pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,2/ide@1/cmdk@0,0
3. c5d1 <drive type unknown>
/pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,2/ide@1/cmdk@1,0
Specify disk (enter its number): 3

AVAILABLE DRIVE TYPES:
0. DEFAULT
1. other
Specify disk type (enter its number): 1 <--- this is correct, right?
Enter number of data cylinders: <---- ????
Enter number of alternate cylinders[2]: <---- ????
Enter number of physical cylinders[30517]: <---- ????

How do I find out the number of data cylinders, alternate cylinders, and physical cylinders a hard drive has?

Thanx.

2

You could probably find this information in BIOS but you may not want to reboot the machine. Check out this page. I don't really know Solaris but this looks like it may help get this information for you.

3

As per your output it appears that you got 4 physical disk and seems you system is based on x86 arch. How did you decided that its disk 1 which is new disk?

I will suggest select disk number and then the partition as option and then print. Not sure as which slice is going to give you number of cylinder, however in case of sparc slice two represents the entire disk there you can get the number of cylinders detail in fourth columns

Like below

4

if you would like to use the the whole disk as a single EFI partition, issue

fdisk -E /dev/rdsk/<disk>
5

why cant you just use the size in MB or GB instead of cylinders?:confused:

6

Don't know if it can help, but usually the physical desciption in cylinder, head, sectors is written on the sticker put in front face of the drive. Otherwise, try to have a look through the BIOS in the section devoted to the hard drives definition if you are on a PC .

7

Locki,

I pulled out the disks. Unfortunately there is no sticker or anything on the hard drives that detail the number of cylinders, heads, sectors, etc.

And because I'm on a Solaris box, I don't know how to get to the BIOS in OpenSolaris. How would I do that?

8

You don't get to the BIOS from Solaris or whatever OS. You get to the BIOS before the OS boots.

Have you an idea about the three other disks size / geometry ?

I would try 30515 data cylinders as the system seems to detect there are 30517 cylinders including 2 alternate ones.

9

this command can say the cylinders of an h/d

10

You might use "fdisk -G device" if you are using an x86 based platform, eg:

# fdisk -G /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0p0
    * Physical geometry for device /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0p0
    * PCYL     NCYL     ACYL     BCYL     NHEAD NSECT SECSIZ
      8924     8924     0        0        255   63    512