Automatic Circumciser

From TSS Chat this morning:
ehowton: He springboarded into the conversation fray, so to speak
mrfixit426: i haven't been in a chat room for about 6 years
ehowton: Chat rooms are kinda gay.
mrfixit426: so please excuse me if i'm a bit slow
ehowton: But we all love soundtracks here.
mrfixit426: me too
ehowton: So, I guess one could say, 'Gay happens'

An excerpt from Wikipedia's Teletubbie's Entry:
The Teletubbies' diet seems to consist exclusively of Tubby Custard (which is sucked through a spiral straw bowl) and Tubby Toast (circular toast with a smiley face on it). They are spectacularly messy eaters. Fortunately one of their companions is the Noo-Noo, a sentient, self-propelled vacuum cleaner.

Yes, I drive a Cavalier because I'm compensating for something.
Why do men who drive gigantic trucks get ridiculed for compensating for a small penis, yet men who drive sub-compacts never get accused of having overly-large cocks?

My work Messageboard from this morning:
According to man, fmthard cannot write a VTOC on an unlabeled disk under 1TB. My assumtion is that because these disks are 1TB, a VTOC was written! Therefore, when the disks were labeled they were done so prior to having the partition table layed out. I'm curious how to 'create' partition 2 on a raw device, but I have a few ideas. Will chit-chat with Art and David on getting this RAID group detroyed and rebuilt.

...Later that same day....

The 3 new 1TB SAN disks were labeled without a whole-disk partition (slice 2, backup). fmthard writes partition 2 by default if it's not present but:

fmthard -d 0:0:0x00:0:0 -d 1:0:0x00:0:0 -d 6:0:0x00:0:0 -d 8:0:0x00:0:0 /dev/rdsk/c2t6d0s2
expected one reserved partition, but found 0

And trying to create it manually returns the same error:

fmthard -d 0:0:0x00:0:0 -d 1:0:0x00:0:0 -d 2:5:0x01:34:2147483581 -d 6:0:0x00:0:0 -d 8:0:0x00:0:0 /dev/rdsk/c2t6d0s2

But one at a time and we're successful unti partition 8 (which is a misnomer, there are only 7, 0-6. However, these disks start at block 34 and include a partition 8!

bash-2.05# fmthard -d 0:0:0x00:0:0 /dev/rdsk/c2t6d0s0
bash-2.05# fmthard -d 1:0:0x00:0:0 /dev/rdsk/c2t6d0s1
bash-2.05# fmthard -d 6:0:0x00:0:0 /dev/rdsk/c2t6d0s6
bash-2.05# fmthard -d 8:0:0x00:0:0 /dev/rdsk/c2t6d0s8
fmthard: Cannot stat device /dev/rdsk/c2t6d0s8
bash-2.05# fmthard -d 2:5:0x01:34:2147483581 /dev/rdsk/c2t6d0s2
fmthard: Partition 8 overlaps partition 2. Overlap is allowed
only on partition on the full disk partition).

Now we can use format normally to produce the following output:

Part Tag Flag First Sector Size Last Sector
0 unassigned wm 0 0 0
1 unassigned wu 0 0 0
2 unassigned wm 0 0 0
3 unassigned wm 0 0 0
4 unassigned wm 0 0 0
5 unassigned wm 0 0 0
6 unassigned wm 0 0 0

However, cannot create partition 2 because of partition 8, as shown on prtvtoc output:

* /dev/rdsk/c2t6d0s2 partition map
*
* Dimensions:
* 512 bytes/sector
* 2147483648 sectors
* 2147483581 accessible sectors
*
* Flags:
* 1: unmountable
* 10: read-only
*
* Unallocated space:
* First Sector Last
* Sector Count Sector
* 34 2147467196 2147467229
*
* First Sector Last
* Partition Tag Flags Sector Count Sector Mount Directory
8 11 00 2147467230 16384 2147483613

Further investigation reveals that this error on label:

Partition 2 ends at 2147483648
It must be between 34 and 2147483614.
Partition 8 overlaps partition
Warning: error writing EFI.
Label failed.

Might be related to bugid 6237585 "Cannot revert EFI labeled disk back to VTOC" for which there's patch 119374, which is not present on ncgcasm01 (showrev -p | grep 119374), listed on sunsolve HERE This patch requires an immediate reboot of the box after patching. Best guess guys.
Eric <ehowton@ftw.nrcs.usda.gov>
- Tuesday, June 14, 2005 at 11:53:22 (CDT)

UPDATE!
Ok, so partition 8 is a standard Solaris reserved partition. I didn't know that. That being said, I was able to create a whole-disk partition using the first sector of partition 8 as my last sector, and label the disk!