Yesterday I gained my first experience with installing Solaris 10U6 on on a SPARC workstation with ZFS boot. I had one non-Sun disk (c0t1d0) which was previously used in a Solaris 10U5 install and already had a ZFS partition. Another non-Sun disk (c0t0d0) was brand new. It was my intention to clean slate the two drives and use them as a ZFS mirror.
Using the text installer, I was unceremoniously dumped to a shell prompt after the installer declared that both of my drives were either broken or needed to be labeled. There was no message printed as to how I could restart the installer after the labels were repaired. So I ran format and successfully labeled the first drive with an SMI label. By default, format was not able to label the second drive such that the installer would use it. After the first drive had been labeled, the installer behaved a bit better and at least told me that I could use 'install-solaris' to continue with the installation. I ended up installing on just the first drive with the expectation that I will complete the mirror once the problems with the label on the second drive were figured out. Today I learned that the problem is that if a drive has been used with ZFS before, then it will use an EFI label, and the Solaris 10U6 installer rejects EFI label off-hand even if the user intends to overwrite it. This is very unfriendly behavior. By following instructions at http://sunblog.mbrannigan.com/2007/03/removing-efi-label.html I have been able to remove the nasty EFI label and apply a SMI label so that maybe this disk can successfully used. Bob ====================================== Bob Friesenhahn bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
