Handbook:SPARC/Blocks/Disks

Partitions
Although it is theoretically possible to use the entire disk to house a Linux system, this is almost never done in practice. Instead, full disk block devices are split up in smaller, more manageable block devices. These are known as partitions or slices.

The first partition on the first SCSI disk is, the second and so on.

The third partition on Sun systems is set aside as a special "whole disk" slice. This partition must not contain a file system.

Users who are used to the DOS partitioning scheme should note that Sun disklabels do not have "primary" and "extended" partitions. Instead, up to eight partitions are available per drive, with the third of these being reserved.

Default partition scheme
The table below suggests a suitable starting point for most systems. Note that this is only an example, so feel free to use different partitioning schemes.

Using fdisk to partition the disk
The following parts explain how to create the example partition layout described previously, namely:

Change the partition layout as required. Remember to keep the root partition entirely within the first 2 GB of the disk for older systems. There is also a 15-partition limit for SCSI and SATA.