The metassist command checks disks to determine which disks appear to be unused. The command attempts to conservatively determine which disks are available. Any disk or slice that is in use is unavailable for use by the metassist command. The metassist command checks the following:
Disks used in other disk sets
Mounted slices
Slices with a file system superblock, indicating a mountable file system
Slices used in other Solaris Volume Manager volumes
Any slices that meet one of these criteria are unavailable for top-down volume creation.