Facts:

* VTOC (or EFI) is required to access slices of a disk device
* s2 slice is used to access whole disk (including VTOC on the disk beginning)
* new disk device comes without VTOC
* system: Solaris 10 OS, on SPARC architecture

Question:
How can it be, that format is able write VTOC to a disk if it does not have a VTOC? 

Question in detail: 
To create VTOC, format needs to write s2. To write s2, VTOC needs to exist. Simplified: to create VTOC, VTOC needs to exist. How this chicken and egg problem is avoided by format?

ext #1: if I label an un-labeled disk (c2t5006016041E076B0d8s2), the following happens:

```
[...]
11157:  open("/dev/rdsk/c2t5006016041E076B0d8s2", O_RDWR|O_NDELAY) = 3
[...]
11157/1:        write(1, " D i s k   n o t   l a b".., 33)      = 33
11157/1:        read(0, 0xFF2B9CD0, 1024)       (sleeping...)
11157/1:        read(0, " y\n", 1024)                           = 2
11157/1:        open("/dev/rdsk/c3t5006016141E076B0d8s0", O_RDONLY|O_NDELAY) = 4
11157/1:        ioctl(4, 0x0417, 0xFFBFED80)                    Err#22 EINVAL
11157/1:        close(4)                                        = 0
11157/1:        ioctl(3, 0x04C9, 0xFFBFF52C)                    = 0
11157/1:        ioctl(3, 0x0402, 0xFFBFF644)                    = 0
11157/1:        ioctl(3, 0x0418, 0xFFBFF670)                    = 0
11157/1:        ioctl(3, 0x04C9, 0xFFBFF5B4)                    = 0
11157/1:        ioctl(3, 0x04C9, 0xFFBFF5B4)                    = 0
11157/1:        ioctl(3, 0x04C9, 0xFFBFF5B4)                    = 0
11157/1:        ioctl(3, 0x04C9, 0xFFBFF5B4)                    = 0
11157/1:        ioctl(3, 0x04C9, 0xFFBFF5B4)                    = 0
11157/1:        write(1, "\n\n F O R M A T   M E N".., 15)      = 15
[...]

```

what are those ioctl() calls? They cleanly do the job, but what are these calls actually?