Changing a disk label (EFI / SMI)

I had inserted a drive into a V440 and after running devfsadm, I ran format on the disk. I was presented with the following partition table:

partition> p
Current partition table (original):
Total disk sectors available: 143358320 + 16384 (reserved sectors)

Part Tag Flag First Sector Size Last Sector
0 usr wm 34 68.36GB 143358320
1 unassigned wm 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
8 reserved wm 143358321 8.00MB 143374704

This disk was used in a zfs pool and, as a result, uses an EFI label. The more familiar label that is used is an SMI label (8 slices; numbered 0-7 with slice 2 being the whole disk). The advantage of the EFI label is that it supports LUNs over 1TB in size and prevents overlapping partitions by providing a whole-disk device called cxtydz rather than using cxtydzs2.

However, I want to use this disk for UFS partitions. This means I need to get it back the SMI label for the device. Here’s how it’s done:

# format -e
...
partition> label
[0] SMI Label
[1] EFI Label
Specify Label type[1]: 0
Warning: This disk has an EFI label. Changing to SMI label will erase all
current partitions.
Continue? y
Auto configuration via format.dat[no]?
Auto configuration via generic SCSI-2[no]?
partition> q
...
format> q
#

Running format again will show that the SMI label was placed back onto the disk:

partition> p
Current partition table (original):
Total disk cylinders available: 14087 + 2 (reserved cylinders)

Part Tag Flag Cylinders Size Blocks
0 root wm 0 - 25 129.19MB (26/0/0) 264576
1 swap wu 26 - 51 129.19MB (26/0/0) 264576
2 backup wu 0 - 14086 68.35GB (14087/0/0) 143349312
3 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
4 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
5 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
6 usr wm 52 - 14086 68.10GB (14035/0/0) 142820160
7 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0