CPFMTXA is the front end to IBM's DASD formatter ICKDSF. It has 3 basic functions: LABEL, FORMAT, and ALLOCATE. It expects a virtual disk device to write to. In many cases this is a full pack volume attached to the virtual machine. But it can be a minidisk that starts anywhere in a volume. All of the directives are cast into input which is fed into ICKDSF. LABEL writes a label onto ECKD cylinder 0 track 0 record 3. FORMAT expects a cylinder range to write its bit pattern of 4096 byte blocks. ALLOCATE writes a byte/cylinder map on cyl 0 track 0 record 4 and spill over if needed. Allocations are most interesting to CP: DRCT, SPOL, PAGE, TDSK, PARM, and PERM. Perm is the usual assignment for minidisks but much to my chagrin is also the alloc for critical WARM and CKPT cylinders. Perm can also hold parm space when you use it with the offset option in SAPL.
It is important to format at least cylinder 0 of a real volume and I recommend formatting virtual cyl 0 of a minidisk for good ole' Linux. David Kreuter -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Using CPFORMAT exec From: Cameron Seay <cws...@gmail.com> Date: Sun, May 29, 2011 8:37 pm To: LINUX-390@VM.MARIST.EDU Does anyone have a clearer description of how to use the CPFORMAT exec for formatting DASD? I'm using the SLES10 Cookbook Redbook and was doing fine up to this point. Thanks. -- Cameron Seay, Ph.D. Electronics, Computer and Information Technology School of Technology NC A & T State University Greensboro, NC 336 334 7717 x2251 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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/
