From: "Alan Altmark" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The z/VM 4.3 manual (why are you looking in the 3.1 book?) specifically says that 4M blocks is for virtual disk in storage. There should actually be two lines in that table: one for V-DISK and one for FB-512 (equivalent to the largest 9336, a mod 20). So, for a "real" FBA device, z/VM 4.3 is limited to 1,672,881 blocks. CP VARY ON will not bring an FBA device online that has more than that many blocks. These limits were significantly raised in z/VM 5.1. If you want to play around, you can change the value of MAXFBA in HCPDVTYP COPY and reassemble HCPDIR and HCPIDT. No guarantees, of course.
Alan, The 3.1 manual was quoted since it goes back even further than a 4.3 manual. I thought that since V-DISK in a 4.3 system can be 4194296, I erroneanously thought that that value would be this MAXFBA value instead of 1672881. Actually, having never run into this limitation before with VM FBA disks on P390 and FLEX systems I had always assumed that one could make them any size as long as the underlying opsys (z/Vse) could handle them until seeing this table of limitations. . So I have for the first time, z/VSE can support a larger FBA disk than z/VM 4.3. Solutions are to upgrade to z/VM 5.1 or try to patch z/VM 4.3 with patching appearing to be a quick short term solution. I can find and zap the four occurrences of the full word containing 1672881 in the DIRECTXA MODULE without locating any source and a method to properly assemble and link it. However, I need another clue for HCPIDT. Regards, Mike Lee
