Adding additional HD to sparc 5.8 machine

[Job317]

I have a 20GB drive that I want to add to my sparc 5.8 machine to provide additional storage space.

Basically, all I want to do is format it, give it a single partition and mount it on, say, /mnt/hdisk1.

There's one more nice-to-have... since I just added memory to the machine too, I would like to make a new swap partition on this drive - say, 1GB. If it makes things simpler, I can just use this new swap partition and blow the old one away (which would be too small to be relevant now anyway).

Will having the swap partition on the new disk (hdisk1) instead of on the original (hdisk0) cause problems for the system?

If not, can someone point me to a procedure for doing this?

Thanks.

 

[elgrandeperro]

Since the swap is raw, the only requirement is that it be a valid partition. All you need to do is run format on the new drive, and allocate a partition (by convention partition 1). Since you are going to use the reset of free space, you probably want to start it low or high so you maximize the disk.

Then all you need to do is edit /etc/vfstab, either adding the new partition for additional swap and (optionally) commenting out the old swap partition. It might be wise to keep the original swap or make it smaller so you can still work if the second drive fails. Swapping will be also faster with 2 drives because the system (I believe) automatically interleaves the 2 swap areas.

After editting /etc/vfstab, reboot and you should be in business.

Remember, if you want to reclaim the original swap space you probably will have to run dump, newfs, restore, unless you are running some volume manager so the filesystem can be grown.