zfs discuss - Feb 2009 - Drive labels and Solaris 10U6 ZFS install

Yesterday I gained my first experience with installing Solaris 10U6 on 
on a SPARC workstation with ZFS boot.  I had one non-Sun disk (c0t1d0) 
which was previously used in a Solaris 10U5 install and already had a 
ZFS partition.  Another non-Sun disk (c0t0d0) was brand new.  It was 
my intention to clean slate the two drives and use them as a ZFS 
mirror.

Using the text installer, I was unceremoniously dumped to a shell 
prompt after the installer declared that both of my drives were either 
broken or needed to be labeled.  There was no message printed as to 
how I could restart the installer after the labels were repaired.  So 
I ran format and successfully labeled the first drive with an SMI 
label.  By default, format was not able to label the second drive such 
that the installer would use it.  After the first drive had been 
labeled, the installer behaved a bit better and at least told me that 
I could use ''install-solaris'' to continue with the
installation.

I ended up installing on just the first drive with the expectation 
that I will complete the mirror once the problems with the label on 
the second drive were figured out.

Today I learned that the problem is that if a drive has been used with 
ZFS before, then it will use an EFI label, and the Solaris 10U6 
installer rejects EFI label off-hand even if the user intends to 
overwrite it.  This is very unfriendly behavior.

By following instructions at 
http://sunblog.mbrannigan.com/2007/03/removing-efi-label.html I have 
been able to remove the nasty EFI label and apply a SMI label so that 
maybe this disk can successfully used.

Bob
=====================================Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/