As far as formatting the disks before doing YaST, it's probably time for a shameless plug again.
http://www.vm.ibm.com/download/packages/descript.cgi?CMS2CDL "The CMS2CDL program takes a minidisk that has been formatted by the CMS FORMAT command and modifies it such that it looks like a disk that was processed by dasdfmt and fdasd." Rob
