Hi Phil and Linux under VM Listers, I already have such a formatter I wrote in the 1970s to format full and minidisks for use as VPARS database disks and VTAPE library disks. My formatter formats the disks with an O/S label track and VTOC and the rest if the disk is 4K records.
I put my O/S VTOC on track zero following the label but can easily move it to track one for Linux. It will also be easy to change it so it can create 512, 1024 and 2048 byte blocks like DASDFMT does. My formatter also formats FBA disks but I'll have to figure out what Linux wants on an FBA disk because it's certainly not O/S format. So far I've done a Google search and found some DASDFMT and FDASD source and will try to figure out what information is put in the format 1 DSCBs for Linux information but expect I may be able to get some of that information from other Linux users that follow this and the Linux list. I've also done a DDR print of tracks 0 & 1 of our Linux IPL disk to see what's there. I have SLES10 here so I can test mounting the disk on Linux after I modify the formatter. I will need to take out my copyright statement and replace it with a general use statement but I'm willing to under take the project if those that have followed this thread want me to. Best regards, Rick Rick Bourgeois, President Virtual Software Systems, Inc. 7715 Browns Bridge Rd Gainesville, GA 30506 [EMAIL PROTECTED] 770-781-3200 -----Original Message----- From: The IBM z/VM Operating System [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Phil Smith III Sent: Saturday, December 01, 2007 10:20 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Formatter for/Linux Minidisk from CMS Thomas Kern wrote: >If such a tool can be made, why not go just a bit further and mimic what >would have been done by dasdfmt and fdisk (1 partion on the whole mdisk)? Indeed. This can't be THAT hard, but the problem is that it needs someone who understands BOTH sides of the fence at a fairly deep level. Or two someones, one on each side, who can talk to each other. Boeblingen? >And optionally, why not put in the correct blocks that mimic an mkfs? Which fs? ext2? ext3? Reiser? xFS? HamsterFS? etc... and Jim Stracka wrote, re only formatting cylinder 0: >If the owner of the z/Linux guest does not remember to >reformat it after it is given to the guest, they could easily forget >that most if it is still unformatted. They might even get far enough to >pvcreate it, and add it to a VG, only to find out when they run mkfs >that it is mostly bad. So the "cylinder 0" solution would work for all cases you can think of except LVM? If so, I wonder if there isn't a way to set cylinder 0 so that it looks formatted but with 0 size, such that adding it to a VG would fail. I'm far from knowing enough to even guess at whether this is reasonable, I'm afraid. ...phsiii
