Slice 8 is a reserved area at the end of the disk.

I don't see too much wrong with what you are doing except my first questions are:

1. What hardware is this?
2. What version of Solaris
3. The disk is being recognised as a 500MB disk. Emphasis on the "MB"! Is that right????
4. What type of disk is it? SCSI, SATA, IDE or what? Showing as a NetApp LUN?

If it is right, it's been a long time since I've seen one of those.

---------- Post updated at 11:00 AM ---------- Previous update was at 10:49 AM ----------

Oh, and one more question:

5. Have you actually written an EFI label to this disk?

(EFI labels occupy 34 sectors (0-33) so the first partition usually starts at sector 34.)
If you haven't written the EFI label you might need to use:

Code:

# format -e

expert mode to do that.