The prtvtoc command provides the following information:

Dividing a Disk Into Slices

The format utility is most often used by system administrators to divide a disk into slices. The steps are as follows:

• Determining which slices are needed

• Determining the size of each slice

• Using the format utility to divide the disk into slices

• Labeling the disk with new slice information

• Creating the file system for each slice

The easiest way to divide a disk into slices is to use the modify command from the partition menu of the format utility. The modify command allows you to create slices by specifying the size of each slice without having to keep track of the starting cylinder boundaries. The modify command also keeps tracks of any disk space that remains in the "free hog" slice.

Using the Free Hog Slice

When you use the format utility to change the size of one or more disk slices, you designate a temporary slice that will expand and shrink to accommodate the resizing operations.

This temporary slice donates, or "frees," space when you expand a slice, and receives, or "hogs," the discarded space when you shrink a slice. For this reason, the donor slice is sometimes called the free hog.

The free hog slice exists only during installation or when you run the format utility. There is no permanent free hog slice during day-to-day operations.

For information on using the free hog slice, see SPARC: How to Create Disk Slices and Label a Disk or x86: How to Create Disk Slices and Label a Disk.