Add an external USB disk to solaris (x86)

These are the steps I took to add an external USB disk to my x86 Solaris station, partition it and put ufs filesystems on it.

• Tell the removable volume manager to leave USB disks alone
  
  
  • edit /etc/vold.conf
    
    

    # commented the following line
    # use rmdisk drive /dev/rdsk/c*s2 dev_rmdisk.so rmdisk%d
    

    
    
  • Activate the configuration change
    
    

    # svcadm refresh volfs
    

    
    
  
  
• attach the USB drive
• lookup the USB device name
  
  

  # rmformat
  Looking for devices...
       1. Volmgt Node: /vol/dev/aliases/cdrom0
          Logical Node: /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s2
          Physical Node: /pci@0,0/pci-ide@6/ide@0/sd@0,0
          Connected Device: LITE-ON  DVD SOHD-16P9S   F3S2
          Device Type: DVD Reader
       2. Logical Node: /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0p0
          Physical Node: /pci@0,0/pci108e,5347@2,1/storage@4/disk@0,0
          Connected Device: ST316021 2A               0000
          Device Type: Removable
  

  
  
• Solaris x86: create a Solaris fdisk partition on the device
  
  

  # fdisk -B /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0p0
  

  
  
• Partition the drive. The format expert option is needed for the drive to show up:
  
  

  # format -e
  Searching for disks...done
  
  AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
         0. c1t0d0 <DEFAULT cyl 9726 alt 2 hd 255 sec 63>
            /pci@0,0/pci108e,5347@7/disk@0,0
        1 . c2t0d0 <DEFAULT cyl 19454 alt 2 hd 255 sec 63>
            /pci@0,0/pci108e,5347@2,1/storage@4/disk@0,0
  Specify disk (enter its number): 1
  ...
  

  
  
• Now partition the drive.
  
  
  • Solaris x86: keep clear of cylinder0. It is in slice 8 and reserved for the VTOC and booting (grub).
  
  
• create a file system on your partition(s) (I ignored the warning)
  
  

  # newfs /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0s0
  Warning: setting rpm to 60
  newfs: construct a new file system /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0s0: (y/n)? y
  ...
  

  
  
• Add the file system to /etc/vfstab
  
  

  ...
  /dev/dsk/c2t0d0s0       /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0s0      / stuff      ufs     1       yes
  

  
  
• mount the file system

# mount /stuff