How do I use an EIDE/ATA disk larger than 8GB?

How do I use an EIDE/ATA disk larger than 8GB?

Versions of Solaris earlier than Solaris 7 don't support EIDE drives larger
than 8GB -- if you try to use one, only the first 8GB will be accessible.

If you are using a larger EIDE drive in this way (with only the first 8GB
accessible), are upgrading to Solaris 7 or later, and want to use the
full disk, first, back up any data that's on it (this procedure will
effectively erase the disk), then zero the disk label: e.g. if your
disk is c0t1d0, zero the disk label by:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdsk/c0t1d0s2 bs=1b count=16
and reboot. Solaris 7 or later will then recognize the full disk.
Thanks to Michael DeSimone for this suggestion.

There are some third-party patches to Solaris 2.5.1 and 2.6 to add support
for disks larger than 8GB, at ftp://ftp.tadpolecycle.com/pub/bigdisks/
Thanks to Christian Iseli for the pointer.


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