Professional Geekism

I’m always, always forgetting how to discover the available disks on a Solaris/OpenSolaris machine.

As I was having another (un-successful) crack at getting a disk controller (other than the motherboard’s IDE controller) to work with Nexenta Core v2, I’d again forgotten how I was meant to discover the disks as-probed by the OpenSolaris kernel.

Of course, Nexenta includes Ubuntu Hardy’s userland tools, but anything kernel/device-related is still very different to what I’m used to.

I finally found a particularly well-written post by Pascal Gienger, whom notes that:

First we will try to look up the disks accessible by our system:

# format
Searching for disks...done
AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
0. c0d0
/pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@0/cmdk@0,0
1. c1d0
/pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@1/cmdk@0,0
Specify disk (enter its number): ^C

Type CTRL-C to quit “format”.

If your disks do not show up, use devfsadm:

# devfsadm
# format
Searching for disks...done
AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
0. c0d0
/pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@0/cmdk@0,0
1. c0d1
/pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@0/cmdk@1,0
2. c1d0
/pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@1/cmdk@0,0
3. c1d1
/pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@1/cmdk@1,0
Specify disk (enter its number): ^C

You’ll notice that the virtual disks are mapped as IDE/ATA drives, so the disk device names don’t have a target specification “t”.

Which has helped me to finally find out that my second-hand (i.e. ‘borrowed’ from an old work machine) Adaptec RAID card, doesn’t work with Nexenta Core v2. Still, Core v3 will be out in a few months – maybe I’ll try again then.

Also worth noting, as it may be useful, iostat -En prints out similar information useful when searching for disks to use with ZFS.