[indiana-discuss] Do newly installed disks need formatting in some way

[Sanjay Nadkarni]

Harry Putnam wrote:
> If I install a new IDE disk into a freshly installed 2008.11 (101b)
> that resides on a partitioned disc.  The new install claiming 25GB
> leaving 35gb more I wanted to get into a raidz pool.
>
>   
I am not following here.  Are you installing 2008.11 to an IDE disk ? 
> What do I really need to do to create a raidz pool using this disk?  I
> don't mean the mechanics of creating the zpool, that seems well
> documented.
>   
Is this going to be the root pool or a secondary pool.  raidz as root 
pool is not supported using 2008.11.
> I mean like if the disk has partitions from another os?
>
> Do I need to `format/fdisk' and remove the partitions?  Then create a
> single partition for the whole disk?
>   
This might be needed.
 Disk naming convention in Solaris is as follows:
fdisk partitions
cxdyp0 (entire disk)
cxdyp1 (partition 1)
..
cxdyp4 (partition 4). 

Extended partition are currently not supported. 
Any disk partition can be marked as a Solaris type 2 partition and 
within this Solaris places it's lablel called VTOC.  A VTOC allows one 
to further divide the partition into slices.  Slices are represented in 
the device namespace as cxdys{0,7}.  By convention, slice 2 covers the 
entire partition.

A zpool can take the entire disk by using cxdyp0 or cxdy (the p0 is 
implied) as the disk name.   In this case zfs will place a GPT label 
(EFI spec). Alternatively one can also allocate all the disk to one 
partition, place a VTOC on it. 

> If so, at the part it prompts you for a type of file system, what do I
> need to do there?
>
> Also, assuming the disk I installed on is also partitioned leaving 25
> GB for sol-11 (1101b) and 35 to use in a zpool.
>   
Two Solaris fdisk partitions are not supported. 
> What do I need to do to the remaining un-partitioned part of the disc?
> Again, we run into the filesystem type prompt.
>
> If I create a second partition encompassing the rest of the disk, how
> to tell zfs about it?
>
> In the online demos I've seen the raid1z is created using only the discs
> that `format' sees.
>
> Or is all the partitioning anxiety completely unnecessary?
>
> I may just be blind but, the supposed Bible of OpenSolaris appears to
> have pretty thin treatment in this area.  It goes over ZFS a bit but
> I'm not finding details about preparing disks for use, or what to do
> with disks that have partitions.
>
> At least one demo site 
> (Simons blog about zfs - 
>   http://breden.org.uk/2008/09/01/home-fileserver-raidz-expansion/) 
>
> says you can't expand a raidz pool.  That is has to be recreated
> through a bunch of manipulations involving backup of possibly huge
> amount of data.
>
> Is that still the case in the latest dev builds?
>
> I ask because I have 1 disk  and a sata controller on order that will
> allow me to add another three disks to the setup.  Right now I'm just
> tinkering (and probably annoying the heck out of these lists) trying
> to understand the way zfs is intended to be used.
>
> I can create and destroy all I want with the two discs I now have to
> work with but not really understanding how treat partial discs or
> discs with partitions; wondering to if I should wait until all disks are
> installed before creating a real zfs pool that will start filling up
> with data.
>
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