Actually, writing DSORG PS or DA from CMS is also not too bad if you know what you are doing. There used to be a product offered by Adessa called Write OS (WOS). We used it for several years back in the late '80s and early '90s.
Regards, Richard Schuh -----Original Message----- From: The IBM z/VM Operating System [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jeff Gribbin, EDS Sent: Tuesday, June 27, 2006 12:46 AM To: IBMVM@LISTSERV.UARK.EDU Subject: Re: Volume with minidisks has no allocation information Further to the comments regarding sharing of DASD between CMS users and = OS - this was routine behaviour at a former employer of mine (back when = DASD was always in short supply). We would format the DASD on the OS side= , allocate a dataset covering the back end - and then zap the VTOC to flag = the dataset as password-protected, but never put a password into the password dataset (RAC-who? <grin>). This effectively rendered the, "CMS" = cylinders unreadable from OS. On VM we would allocate a dummy minidisk = that mapped the OS part of the disk (to keep DISKMAP and the such happy) = and then simply allocate CMS minidisks on the, "CMS portion" in the usual= manner. Never a problem in many years of operation. As Tom said, "As long= as everyone agrees to what's being done ...". In this particular setup, V= M and OS ran on separate machines with a fully-shared DASD farm. Reading CMS minidisks from OS is not, "difficult". Again, at a different = former employer, this was routine behaviour - we had a utility that serve= d as a kind-of poor man's RSCS by reading JCL stored on a specified CMS minidisk and submitting it into the internal reader. The writing of code = of this kind was considered a training exercise for junior sysprogs - onc= e they'd successfully done something like this you could confidently expect= them to understand a whole raft of basic functionality from BDAM through = DYNALLOC and the internals of the CMS File System and the CP Object Directory. It also helped to break down the barriers between the VM Bigot= s and the OS Bigots (not that, other than in the sense of gentle rivalry, = I've ever found this to exist among real systems programmers - who seem = eager to take apart anything and everything to find out how it works - or= was that, "worked" <oops>). Regards Jeff Gribbin
