Solaris disk layout

On a SPARC system

• VTOC is in cylinder 0, sector 0 and can contain 8 slices
  
  
  • slice 2 by convention represents the entire disk
• the primary boot block is in cylinder 0, sectors 1-15
• A file system can start on cylinder 0, sector 16

On x86 the situation is a bit more complicated:

If Solaris is installed on cylinder 1 (typical) disk cylinder 1 = Solaris (relative) cylinder 0.
Solaris x86 VTOC supports 16 slices:

• 0-7: like SPARC slices
• 8: boot slice (relative cylinder 0)
• 9: on IDE/SATA disks default alternate slice (relative cylinder 1 and 2)
• 10-15: unused