On Fri, 07 Jan 2011 20:06:25 -0500 (EST), Richard Troth wrote: > Stephen Powell wrote: >> ... >> The Linux kernel does not consider an LDL-format disk to be "unpartitioned". >> ... > > But the partition you see is a phantom. And you can use an LDL-format > disk as if it were "unpartitioned". > > We're battling semantics, or something along those lines. I > previously used the term "partition zero". People did not seem to > understand that. The "whole disk" seems to work.
OK, now I think I understand what you are talking about. You're swimming upstream, Rick. That's not the way things were designed to work. Linux grew up in the Intel 386 world, where hard disks were always assumed to be partitioned. IBM mainframe DASD did not fit that pattern; so a way was invented to "partition" mainframe DASD. For cdl, an OS-style VTOC acted as the "partition table" and a "dataset" acted as a partition. (Of course, some restrictions were added. The dataset had to consist of a single extent, and a maximum of three datasets could be defined.) For LDL and CMS formats, there is no "partition table". The single partition on the disk is implicit, rather than explicit. Nevertheless, it is there. You should always make your file systems (mkfs et al) or swap spaces (mkswap) on a PARTITION; never on a DEVICE. The only thing in your system that should refer to a DEVICE is zipl, when it writes out IPL records. IPL records are written by zipl to a DEVICE, not a PARTITION. The concept of a "partition boot sector" from the i386 world was really never carried over into the mainframe world. Mainframe DASD partitions don't have boot sectors. In the mainframe world, only the "master boot record" (the device itself) can be IPLed. I understand what you want to do, but that is not how things were designed to work. You're trying to force a square peg into a round hole. If you follow the advice of the above paragraph, you should never have any problems. -- .''`. Stephen Powell : :' : `. `'` `- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
