SUN/BSD disk partitioning

[x]

I'm going to install Solaris8 and need some info about partitioning.
As I understand it, a disklabel has to be added which will occupy sector 0. My first partition starts at cyl 1, so the disklabel will cause no problem. Correct?
Reading the man-pages for fdisk, it says:
"A BSD/SUN type disklabel can describe 8 partitions, the third of which should be a `whole disk' partition."
What is this supposed to mean? ... can describe 8 SUN type partitions I hope, or what happens with the other partitions?
The disk has 11 partitions totally, all four primary used. The "whole disk" partition, is that something like the extended partition, and how does this disklabel/SUN partitioning cooperate with other partitioning schemes?

[garskoci]

I dunno where your numbers are from. Are you installing on a sparc? This is pretty much what I was taught about Slaris disk slices.

0 or a /
1 or b swap space
2 or c entire disk
3 or d
4 or e
5 or f /opt
6 or g /usr
7 or h /export/home

where 2,3 & 4 overlap other slices.
2 - Shows data about the whole disk.
3 - Overlaps /usr and /export/home.
4 - Overlaps /opt & /usr.

[bjzuk]

Sun supports up to eight "slices" (partitions in Sun terminology) per disk. Slice 2 represents the entire disk, from cylinder 0 to the last cylinder on the disk. It's considered dangerous to change the size of Slice 2. The other slices, 0, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, are defined by specifing a starting cylinder, and a size in kilobytes, megabytes, or cylinders using the Solaris format program(similar to fdisk). You can't have two slices in use that overlap, or share the same cylinders. If this happens, then one slice will be modifying cylinders in use by another slice. This also means that if you choose to use Slice 2, or the entire disk as a single slice, you can't create and use any other slices on that disk.

It gets a little more confusing when you're running Solaris x86, because Solaris' disk label gets applied on top of a primary/extended partition. If you look at the disk partitions in Linux with fdisk, for example, the Solaris partition will show up as a normal partition(either extended or primary, depending on how you partitioned the disk) with disk type 82, or Linux Swap. That partition will be split up further by Solaris, which treats it as if it were a single disk.