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Administering disks

Rootability

Note: If you are adding an uninitialized disk, warning and error messages are displayed on the console during the vxdiskadd command. Ignore these messages. These messages should not appear after the disk has been fully initialized; the vxdiskadd command displays a success message when the initialization completes.

The interactive dialog for adding a disk using vxdiskadd is similar to that for vxdiskadm, described in “Adding a disk to VxVM” on page 97.

Rootability

Rootability indicates that the volumes containing the root file system and the system swap area are under VxVM control. Without rootability, VxVM is usually started after the operating system kernel has passed control to the initial user mode process at boot time. However, if the volume containing the root file system is under VxVM control, the kernel starts portions of VxVM before starting the first user mode process.

Under HP-UX, a bootable root disk contains a Logical Interchange Format (LIF) area. The LIF LABEL record in the LIF area contains information about the starting block number, and the length of the volumes that contain the stand and root file systems and the system swap area. When a VxVM root disk is made bootable, the LIF LABEL record is initialized with volume extent information for the stand, root, swap, and dump (if present) volumes.

See “Setting up a VxVM root disk and mirror” on page 104 for details of how to configure a bootable VxVM root disk from an existing LVM root disk.

Note: From the AR0902 release of HP-UX 11i onward, you can choose to configure either a VxVM root disk or an LVM root disk at install time. See the HP-UX Installation and Configuration Guide for more information.

See the chapter “Recovery from Boot Disk Failure” in the Veritas Volume Manager Troubleshooting Guide, for information on how to replace a failed boot disk.

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HP Veritas Volume Manager 5.0 -UX 11i v3 manual Rootability