On Wed, 2003-12-10 at 04:08, Mark Post wrote: > Eric, > > Why are you running cpfmtxa on a minidisk? That is normally only used for > _complete_ DASD volumes by the z/VM system programmer before carving it up > into minidisks.
Even that is not needed. All the VM Systems Programmer needs to do is format cylinder 0 and label the pack. Only for CP data areas like paging, spool and checkpoint or warmstart you need to format the tracks. With minidisks the virtual cylinders need to be formatted afterwards anyway. Indeed, we found that the installer does not pick up the disks when they have not been formatted properly for Linux in advance. Mark is right that the dasdfmt program is in the initrd, but it takes a lot of tweaking to load the drivers and make the device nodes. I just noticed that when you format the minidisk with ICKDSF it still is not picked up by Linux either, but reported as 'incompatible disk layout'. So that does not work either. Some time ago I did put together a small program to convert a CMS formatted disk into a Linux CDL format. That is something we run before we IPL the starter system for the installation. I'll see whether I can get it in such a state that I could give that. Otherwise we would probably need a step-by-step recipe on how to format the disks with the RHEL starter system. Rob
