Got myself a new external USB drive

I've been backing up my ZFS data to my PC booted into Solaris and running a send/recv operation. This works fine but takes a while so I need to run it overnight and I'm concerned about my leccy bill.

So I've been thinking about an external USB drive for a while now and picked up a 1TB unit in the PC World sale for a shade under 70 quid. I've decided to chop it up using fdisk into 2 partitions;

25% for pcfs which I'll sync my homedir to using rsync, and

74% which I'll put in a zpool and pour my ZFS data into.

My thinking being; ZFS is the business but if my tinkering does something severe to my server and I need my docs in a hurry, at least I can read my docs on my PC/laptop whilst I'm getting my server back up and running.

So, steps to set the disk up for PCFS;

1. Attach the disk and check the new device in format.

2. fdisk /dev/rdsk/c7t0d0p0

Slice it up: 25% as FAT=32, the remainder for Solaris2

3. mkfs -F pcfs -o fat=32 /dev/rdsk/c7t0d0p0:c

Unplug and plug back in again and the new partition is mounted;

Filesystem size used avail capacity Mounted on

/dev/dsk/c7t0d0p0:1 233G 64K 233G 1% /media/NONAME

Steps to set the other partition up for ZFS;

1. format

Select disk and slice up vtoc such that there are no overlapping slices. format will automagically take you into the Solaris partition so no worries there.

2. zpool create neo /dev/dsk/c7t0d0s0

Keep the matrix theme.

All done!