How to access a solaris partition

vibhor_agarwali · July 6, 2007, 8:36am

Hi,

I have the present scenario on a x86 machine.

fdisk c0d0p0

                                                      Cylinders

Partition Status Type Start End Length %
1 Active Solaris2 1 2500 2500 61
2 Solaris2 2501 4094 1594 39

Now how do i access the 2 partition.

Thanks

porter · July 6, 2007, 10:09am

Normally with Solaris you deal with slices.

So, for example, what is your / mounted on?

/dev/dsk/c0d0s0?

and possibly a separate /export/home on /dev/dsk/c0d0s7.

However i386 based PCs use the term 'partitions' so Solaris lets you reference these as

/dev/dsk/c0d0p0 etc.

so in theory your 2nd partition on the 1st disk should be

/dev/dsk/c0d0p1

vibhor_agarwali · July 9, 2007, 5:57am

I do have

/dev/dsk/c0d0s0 mounted as /
/dev/dsk/c0d0s7 mounted as /export/home

On trying to mount c0d0p1

mount /dev/dsk/c0d0p1 /mnt/a
mount: /dev/dsk/c0d0p1 is not this fstype

Now what shal i do

porter · July 9, 2007, 6:28am

Have you created a file system in the 2nd partition?

vibhor_agarwali · July 9, 2007, 8:12am

See my first post.

Its a Solaris2 type. :rolleyes:

porter · July 9, 2007, 5:30pm

Just because a partition is of a certain type does not mean the partition has been formatted etc. :rolleyes: It merely means that the magic number in the main boot record is set to a specific number.

vibhor_agarwali · July 10, 2007, 1:10am

So shall i create one with mkfs

porter · July 10, 2007, 4:12am

I honestly don't know. Solaris normally works on the concept of slices, rather like IRIX, NetBSD etc. It would actually have been better to give the whole disk to Solaris, rather than having partitions. What you must do is confirm absolutely that no other slice overlaps this 2nd partition.

vibhor_agarwali · July 11, 2007, 5:24am

That i am sure,

As will installing it asked me to create the above 2 slices on partition one.
I thought something would come for partition 2 also, but nothing came up.

And i am stuck now.

blowtorch · July 11, 2007, 5:40am

This will happen when you install Solaris on a x86 system. Before install, even before creating the slices, the install program will ask if you want to partition the hard disk using fdisk. There, if you choose not to, you will get the entire disk for Solaris installation. The partition that you have created is a hard partition not a slice. You can install another OS on the other partition.

porter · July 11, 2007, 5:44am

You could do a backup and reinstall the OS from scratch again...

As it's always good to be confident installing an OS.
Put the first installation down as a practice run.
Let's you rehearse your backup/restore procedure.

vibhor_agarwali · July 11, 2007, 8:18am

Even though i install another OS in the other partition, how can i access that partition afterwards.

vibhor_agarwali · July 11, 2007, 8:19am

Everything here is practice, as i am just trying to figure out things and the installation is being done on a VmWare.

porter · July 11, 2007, 9:02am

The partition has to be in a format that Solaris would understand. So if you put Windows on it and you want Solaris to be able to read/write that partition you would have to be using FAT32, not NTFS, as Solaris does not support NTFS.

Similarly the magic id in the main-boot-record would indicate that the partition was a DOS or Windows one. Yours seems to say it's a Solaris partition.

vibhor_agarwali · July 11, 2007, 9:36am

Right now i haven't installed any other OS.

Via fdisk , created a partition while installing the Solaris, and its Solaris2 type right now.