Formatting The Disk; Labelling The Disk - Sun Microsystems Sun Workstation 100U System Manager's Manual

Ill5talling UNIX on Systems without Tape Support
Sun 100/150 Installation Manual
the different disks. When you have specified which disk drive you are using, diag then displays
a table of the physical data about that disk, which includes the number of cylinders, number of
alternate cylinders, number of heads, and number of sectors per track.
At this point,
dial
knows
a.U
it needs to know about the disk, and it displays its prompt:
diag>
One of the responses to this prompt can be the h (for help) command. If you use the h com-
mand,
dial
displays a list of its commands.
5.5.1.
Formatting the Disk
If you are starting with a completely new disk, you will need to format the disk first. If you are
not starting with a completely new disk, you can skip to the next topic,
Labelling the Di,k.
Before formatting, clear any outstanding errors by typing the clear command:
diag:>
dear
clear
diag>
Next, type the format command.
Diag
then warns you that formatting a disk destroys all
information which might already be stored on that disk, and asks for confirmation before going
ahead and doing the job:
diag> format
format/verify, DESTROYS ALL DISK DATA!
are you sure!
y
*
of surface analysis passes! 5
Use five surface analysis passes for a completely new disk; use one pass for a disk which has
been formatted in the past and is known not to have any bad spots. Formatting a disk takes
anywhere from a half-hour to four hours depending on how many passes you select, the size of
the disk, and the type of controller you happen to have. For example, the format phase takes
about thirty minutes for one surface analysis pass on an 84-MByte disk, using an Interphase
SMD-2180 disk controller, and a slightly shorter time using a Xylogics 450 or 440 controller.
Dial
displays the current cylinder number as it formats each cylinder.
5.5.2. Labelling the Disk
A disk must be labelled after it has been formatted. The purpose of a label is to record (in a
well known place on the disk) information about how the disk is divided up into partitions for
different purposes such
as
swap space and file systems. Diag labels a disk in response to the
label command. Here is an example of using the label command to write a label on the disk
which was format'ted in the discussion above. When you give the
label
command to
diag,
it asks
if you want to use the logical partition map that is "built in" to the program:
5-6
diag> label
label this disk ...
OK to use logical partition map 'Fujitsu-M2312K (Sun D84)' !
y
Are you sure you want to write!
y
Revision H of 12 March 1984