Partitioning system for Sun Sparc machines

Infos extracted from File System Forensic Analysis, Brian Carrier and in particular the online copy here), tables 6.9 and 6.10.

The format is called VTOC (volume table of contents). It is stored at offset 0 on-disk. All values are big endian.

Note that the x86 version of Solaris uses a different layout.

Byte offset Description
0-127 ASCII disk label
128-261 VTOC *
262-263 Sectors to skip when writing
264-265 Setors to skip when reading
266-419 Reserved
420-421 Disk speed
422-423 Number of cylinders
424-425 Alternates per cylinder
426-429 Reserved
430-431 Interleave
432-433 Number of data cylinders
434-435 Number of alternate cylinders
436-437 Number of heads
438-439 Number of sectors per track
440-443 Reserved
444-451 Partition 1 disk map
… More partition disk maps
500-507 Partition 8 disk map
508-509 Signature (0xDABE)
510-511 Checksum

The VTOC itself:

0-3 Version
4-11 Volume name
12-13 Number of partitions
14-15 Partition 1 type
16-17 Partition 1 flags
… More partition types and flags
42-45 Partition 8 type and flags
46-57 Boot info
58-59 Reserved
60-63 Signature 0x600DDEEE
64-101 Reserved
102-105 Partition 1 timestamp
… More partition timestamps
130-133 Parittion 8 timestamp

Partition types (informative):

  1. unassigned
  2. /boot
  3. /
  4. swap
  5. /usr
  6. entire disk
  7. /stand
  8. /var
  9. /home
  10. alternate sector
  11. cachefs

Partition flags:

Disk maps:

0-3 Starting cylinder
4-7 Size (in sectors)