Using larger than 120GB drives on a Blade 1500

UNIX Solaris
1

Hi,

I'm using Solaris 8 on a Blade 1500.

I know that IDE drives are limited to around 120GB, but I was told that it's possible to use larger drives with the only caveat that the available size will be that 120 (or is it 128?) GB size.

But when I try, format shows only very low sizes, like .5GB for example.

120GB drives are hard to come buy nowadays, and I have a stock of 250 to 500 ones that I'd like to use as backups.

Any tips about how to do that? My guess is that Solaris does not understand the disk label format, and that I would have to redo it manually, but I have no idea how.

2

The following was obtained by the "save" command in "format" on a Blade 1500.
If you append it to /etc/format.dat then "format" should offer the "DEFAULT" in the "type" command. Then you can write the Sun disk label with the "label" command.
The OS then will see a 127.5 GB disk.

#
# New disk/partition type  saved on Tue Jun 18 21:41:15 2013
#
disk_type = "DEFAULT" \
         : ctlr = ata : ncyl = 65533 : acyl = 2 : pcyl = 65535 \
         : nhead = 16 : nsect = 255 : rpm = 5400

partition = "original" \
         : disk = "DEFAULT" : ctlr = ata \
         : 0 =  4016, 28674240 : 1 =  0, 16385280 : 2 =  backup, \
         wm, 0, 267374640 : 4 =  usr, wm, 11044, 4096320 : 6 =  \
         unassigned, wm, 12048, 218173920 : 7 =  65522, 44880
1 Like
3

Thank you very much, it's just what I needed!