Identifying the Hard Drives in Your System Under Solaris

May 19, 2008 by Isaac

As someone coming from Linux I find working in Solaris completely backwards. Case in point: Today I needed to get the drive information from a Solaris machine. Of all commands the one to use is "format." Go figure. Anyway, here's how to do it, thanks to this article:

bash-3.00# format
Searching for disks...done

AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
       0. c1t0d0 <SUN72G cyl 14087 alt 2 hd 24 sec 424>
          /pci@1c,600000/scsi@2/sd@0,0
       1. c1t1d0 <SUN72G cyl 14087 alt 2 hd 24 sec 424>
          /pci@1c,600000/scsi@2/sd@1,0
Specify disk (enter its number): 0
selecting c1t0d0
[disk formatted]
Warning: Current Disk has mounted partitions.
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s0 is currently mounted on /. Please see umount(1M).
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s1 is currently used by swap. Please see swap(1M).
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s6 is currently mounted on /var. Please see umount(1M).
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s7 is currently mounted on /sdh_home. Please see umount(1M).

FORMAT MENU:
        disk       - select a disk
        type       - select (define) a disk type
        partition  - select (define) a partition table
        current    - describe the current disk
        format     - format and analyze the disk
        repair     - repair a defective sector
        label      - write label to the disk
        analyze    - surface analysis
        defect     - defect list management
        backup     - search for backup labels
        verify     - read and display labels
        save       - save new disk/partition definitions
        inquiry    - show vendor, product and revision
        volname    - set 8-character volume name
        !<cmd>     - execute <cmd>, then return
        quit
format> inquiry
Vendor:   SEAGATE
Product:  ST373207LSUN72G
Revision: 045A
format>

Now that you have the disk info you can go to the manufacturers web site and look up the drive information. In this case the model number is ST373207L, which turns out to be a 10k RPM 73GB SCSI drive.

Good luck drive hunting.