On 22 April 2013 11:54, R.S. <[email protected]> wrote: > Scenario: z/VM owns some CKD volumes, more volumes are available, remaining > volumes are empty, but formatted for use with MVS. > The goal is to connect one of the remaining volumes to z/VM and format it > with given label. The space shall to be available for user space > (minidisks). > No HCD/IODF activities are necessary. > > What utility should be used? ICKDSF or CPFMTXA? > What command?
Either will do what you need, but for a decade or more now, CPFMTXA is just a front end to ICKDSF, so you may as well use it directly. Last time I looked, the z/OS ICKDSF does not have the needed commands to manage a VM volume, so you have to run it on VM (or in theory, standalone). But ICKDSF is probably familiar to MVS sysprogs. You need to write an allocation map (to ensure CP doesn't accidently use any of the volume for things like paging/spooling), and a dummy VTOC with all space allocated (to discourage any z/OS system that may happen to see the volume), and maybe a volume label (or most likely that's already done). All this is done by formatting cylinder 0, track 0. There is no need to format any other parts of the volume unless you need to erase existing data. Normally each minidisk user will format their own portion upon first use, so your formatting it would just be lots of unnecessary I/O. In all cases, of course, you must have the device ATTACHed to your virtual machine, though the virtual address does not matter. For ICKDSF: Invoke by entering ICKDSF CONCOLE CONSOLE (or let it prompt you). Then: CPVOLUME FORMAT UNIT(uuuu) NOVERIFY VOLID(newvol) RANGE(0,0) You can check the state of an existing volume with CPVOLUME LIST . And you can/should use VERIFY if your volume is already labeled and you want to be sure you are pointing at the right place. Also caution - RANGE default is 0-END, so while it will work, it will waste time and I/Os. For CPFMTXA: CPFMTXA uuuu newvol FORMAT 0 0 and then watch it invoke ICKDSF. The bad news: This is all from memory... Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
