There has been a running discussion about allocation of drive, carts or disk which harkens back to the early days of MVS (later days of MVT) where a shortage of drives, some drive was broken, or good SYSPROGs sysgen'ed into the system more devices than they needed to keep from doing IOGENs. The problem was since the device was gen'ed and OFFLINE, it was a candidate for ALLOCATION.
To resolve this problem, I found (and believe is still there) was a bit in the UCB which was turned on when the CE ran OLTEP. If this bit was on, the system thought it was unavailable. I wrote a small program which could be run as a STC, passing the UCB address and whether to turn it ON or OFF. If the bit was on for a broken drive (or non-existent one), the system would think it had OLTEP running on it and skip any allocation attempts. The byte is the UCBFLG5 where the bit is the UCBNALOC EQU X'04' which says "Offline device is in use by a System Component". I have not tried this a long time but it might solve some issues folks have. Jim ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
