Awesome! If you can make a note of what you had to do in order to get it to work and post it to the list, I'm sure lots of people will be very grateful :)
Okay, so, if you set up, for example, an LVM disk that's 10G in size on Linux, and you do an "fdisk -l" on the LVM volume, you see the following:
linux:~ # fdisk -l /dev/local/Solaris8
Disk /dev/local/Solaris8: 10.7 GB, 10737418240 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1305 cylinders, total 20971520 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000
Disk /dev/local/Solaris8 doesn't contain a valid partition table
This shows C/H/S parameters of 1305/255/63. Seems reasonable enough, so, we boot the install disk in single user mode (boot cdrom:d -s) and use the format command to configure the disk with these settings. (Note: Solaris 9 accepts the heads value of 255 - Solaris 8 seems to choke on even this.) After format is finished configuring the disk, we use the "newfs /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0" command to try to create a new filesystem, and we get this:
# newfs /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0 newfs: construct a new file system /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0: (y/n)? y With a block size of 8192 minimum bytes per inode is 5884 Minimum bytes per inode is 5884 With 16065 sectors per cylinder, minimum cylinders per group is 16 This requires the fragment size to be changed from 1024 to 4096 Please re-run mkfs with corrected parameters
So, apparently there's some limitation on the C/H/S parameters and how those interact with the UFS volume you're trying to create. Obviously one solution is to run mkfs with the suggested fragment size change; however, this is hard to do during the install, and the installer isn't very forgiving about letter you tweak things and continue on with the install. So, what I did is recalculate the C/H/S parameters to reduce the Heads value and increase the Cylinders value. I stuck with the 63 sectors/track number and just recalculated the Cylinders and Heads value. So, if you multiply 1305 * 255, you get 332775. You can then reduce one of the numbers to something more sane - I, for example, reduced Heads to 16, then divide that into 332775 = 20798 (rounded down), which is your new Cylinders value. Reconfigure the disk in format with these new parameters (don't forget to label!), then use newfs, again:
# newfs /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0 newfs: construct a new file system /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0: (y/n)? y /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0: 263088 sectors in 261 cylinders of 16 tracks, 63 sectors 128.5MB in 17 cyl groups (16 c/g, 7.88MB/g, 3776 i/g) super-block backups (for fsck -F ufs -o b=#) at: 32, 16224, 32416, 48608, 64800, 80992, 97184, 113376, 129568, 145760, 161952, 178144, 194336, 210528, 226720, 242912, 258080,
Success! Now we can actually go through the installer and it will partition and format correctly during the install process!
Let me know if anything looks amiss with my calculations - I haven't done any extensive testing to verify that the C/H/S values work at the disk boundaries.
-Nick
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