Reformat necessary for Solaris 2.x?

Recently, I asked if disks that hadn't been formatted since 4.1.1 would

need to be reformatted before going to Solaris 2.x, due to changes in

the disk label.

It was pointed out to me that I should have said "repartitioned"

rather than "reformatted".

Thankfully, the answer is no:

- For disks partitioned under 4.0.x, they can be converted under 4.1.x

by using fsck -c on the unmounted partition. Only the 4.1.x fsck can

do this.

- For disks partitioned under 4.1 and 4.1.1, you just won't be able

to use the new informational features and commands like prtvtoc,

fmthard, view flags and tags.

To see which version a disk is, use dumpfs /dev/disk under 4.1.x

If the first line reads:

magic 11954 format dynamic time Wed Dec 1 10:36:31 1993

^^^^^^^

It was newfs'd under 4.1.x. If it says static, it was newfs'ed under an

earlier version of SunOS.

The UNIX filesystem changed between SunOS 4.1.1 and 4.1.2 to include an

additional field which indicated the status of the filesystem. This is

used by quickcheck (now in fsck) to determine whether the filesystem was

stable or clean and therefore not in need of a complete fsck. This is a

Good Thing.

The filesystem is changed in SunOS 5 to include POSIX compliant user/groupids

which are 32 bit rather than 16 bit. The SunOS 4.1.x UNIX filesystem is

backward compatible. No newfs is necessary. As longs as you use userids

less than 64k under SunOS 5 you can move the filesystem back to SunOS 4.1.x.

One other person mentioned that you do need to change your partitions

under 2.x, since you now need a /opt, /proc, etc.

Thanks to the following people for their prompt replies!

Eric S. Johnson <esj@astro.ufl.edu>

----
Mike van der Velden email: mvanderv@glenayre.com
Glenayre Electronics, Ltd. phone: 604-293-1611, x243
Vancouver, BC. V5K 5B8 fax: 604-293-4317

[4688 byte] By [CodeProf.com] at [2007-12-25 8:37:00]

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