Anyone who has been on VM long enough has seen this. When you CPFMTXA every cylinder of a volume you know that every track has been properly formated. If you DDR or FLASHCOPY or FDR or anything else it formats the tracks that are in use on the source volume. That might not be all of them. When you try to use a cylinder later (maybe years later) for something other than it use at the time it was formated by DDR etc. you may get strange errors because some track is not formated correctly.
Michael MacIsaac wrote:
Whenever I get the opportunity to use new DASD, the first thing I do is CPFMTXA every cylinder of every volume. This is because I've shot myself in the toe a few times by *not* doing it (and that hurts :). Once a "virgin" volume has been CPFMTXA'd it can be dasdfmt'd for Linux for FORMAT'd for CMS and never has to be CPFMTXA'd again (from experience). But, if a virgin volume is not CPFMTXA'd and just dasdfmt'd (or FLASHCOPY'd or DDR'd from another volume), there is no error. Also the volume (minidisk) will seem to be OK, and Linux can be installed, etc. But, Strange Things happen to these volumes - like Linux will not always boot cleanly, etc. Has anyone seen this behavior? If so does anyone know why this happens? Also could it be argued there is a bug somewhere? Thanks.
-- Stephen Frazier Information Technology Unit Oklahoma Department of Corrections 3400 Martin Luther King Oklahoma City, Ok, 73111-4298 Tel.: (405) 425-2549 Fax: (405) 425-2554 Pager: (405) 690-1828 email: stevef%doc.state.ok.us ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
