Mount a UFS partition into a ZFS volume

[H4mm3r]

Hi all,

I'm not sure if there is a way for that but I'm throwing the question.

I have a T5120 with a primary domain and 3 guest domains.
I created 3 ZFS volumes that are used as virtual disks for the guest
domains which have been using it for their UFS partitioning needs.

My question is : Is there a way to see the UFS FS on the ZFS volumes
from the primary domain ?
It can be useful if a system file got broken and the guest domain
won't boot.

Thanks, Thomas.

[Cydrome Leader]

Post by H4mm3r
Hi all,
I'm not sure if there is a way for that but I'm throwing the question.
I have a T5120 with a primary domain and 3 guest domains.
I created 3 ZFS volumes that are used as virtual disks for the guest
domains which have been using it for their UFS partitioning needs.
My question is : Is there a way to see the UFS FS on the ZFS volumes
from the primary domain ?
It can be useful if a system file got broken and the guest domain
won't boot.
Thanks, Thomas.

nice problem there.

For whatever reason, solaris doesn't understand a partition in a file.
Even if your UFS filesytems were just backed with a large UFS file on the
primary domain, there is no direct way to mount that file or any slices
inside it that contain the actual UFS filesystems of the other
domain. ZFS backing slices containing UFS aren't any different, so you
have the same problem- which is you can't read the data.

You can actually get fsck think it finds some data, but if you tell it to
fix stuff, it juts breaks it more.

You could fire up a spare ldom and point the file that backs the disk you
want to read, but that's really the only way.

FWIW, what you want to do works fine on other OSes, like FreBSD for
example where a file representing a disk complete with partitions and
slices can still be mounted.

[H4mm3r]

I did it by mounting the partition on another LDOM running on the same
machine.
I just had to change the VDS service.
Thanks for the answer.