Solaris™ Operating Environment Boot Camp

Preparing the Disk to Receive Filesystems

Solaris provides a menu-based utility (format) that allows you to format, label, and define the slices on a disk. When you run format you are provided with a list of all the disks Solaris can see, numbered from zero upwards, and you are prompted to select the one you wish to work with. As with most commands involving disk and filesystem management, format can only be run by the root user:

hydrogen# format
Searching for disks...done

AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
0. c0t2d0 <Micropolis 2217-15 cyl 2105 alt 3 hd 15 sec 109>
/iommu@0,10000000/sbus@0,10001000/espdma@4,8400000/
esp@4,8800000/sd@2,0
Specify disk (enter its number):

Obviously, we don't have much choice here as our system only has a single hard ...