One strange problem that I've come upon in buying secondhand enterprise hardware are fiber channel disks (such as those that my Sun Blade 1000 takes) sometimes come formatted in a 520-byte block size. Apparently these 520-byte blocks are used by a number of high-end RAID arrays that are the source for bulk quantitites of fiber channel disks, but the 520-byte block size renders them unformattable to Solaris. Reformatting such a disk to 512-byte blocks is not hard, but it is not an immediately intuitive process.

Here is what I did to convert one 520-byte block fiber channel disk (that came out of an EMC CLARiiON array) to a 512-byte block size:

Step 1. Get scu, the SCSI command utility. I think the original website for this tool no longer exists, and I initially got it from this page. In case that page disappears, I also maintain a local copy of scu for Solaris that you can download.

Step 2. Unzip and untar the package, and chmod a+x scu to make the binary executable.

Step 3. Run the Solaris format utility to identify the raw disk to be fixed. In my case, it was 

1. c1t2d0 <SEAGATE-ST373405CLAR72-4A3C cyl 8737 alt 2 hd 255 sec 63>

Step 4. Launch scu on that device (e.g., ./scu -f /dev/rdsk/c1t2d0s0)

Step 5. Issue the following commands from within scu:

> set bypass on
> set device block-length 512
> format

After a really long time (55 minutes in my case), it'll finish. Then simply issue stop to spin down the disk and then exit to clean up.

Step 6. Enter format again, select the disk, then enter verify. It should indicate bytes/sector = 512 or that the block size has been changed correctly.

At this point the disk still isn't usable though. Enter type, then select 0. Auto configure. This may or may not require another very long (like eighteen hours) deep format; I did this deep format prior to this step so it didn't ask me for anything.

After this, issue a label command and it should succeed.

A touch /reconfigure followed by a reboot is necessary to make the disk completely usable I think.

After this, this disk should be a valid target for a command like newfs. I had some amount of trouble being able to add the fixed disk to a zpool immediately after following the above procedure; I wound up trying newfs /dev/rdsk/c1t2d0 followed by zpool create -f newpool c1t2d0 to get the disk completely usable.

For the source of some of this procedure, here's the link. It also explains how to do it in Linux.