Disk breakdown

[u856100]

All,

I have witnessed one of my colleagues issue the command (from ISL)
HPUX (;0)boot scsi.5.0

or something along those lines.

They mentioned that the command referred to disk slicing, and booting from disk slice 0.

Can anyone provide clarity on this at all (how many disk slices are there, and what are they for), as your help would be gratefully appreciated.

thanks all

John

[John Palmer]

Hi

man hpux

will give you most of the details about the hpux bootstrap program.

The ;0 is referred to as the 'minor number' which is driver specific.

Almost everybody now uses LVM which uses whole disks. In the past, disks could have been partitioned into 'slices' or 'sections' and the minor number specified the section number. 'man disk gives some more information.

If you are using LVM, then you can default pretty much everything for hpux. You can specify a hardware path but the default (the disk that you booted from) is almost always the one that you want.

The only arguments that you are likely to use (rarely) are:-

-is boot in single user mode
-lm LVM maintenance mode
-lq (undocumented) override quorum requirement for the boot volume group.
(;0)

Regards,
John

[Patrick Wessel · Accepted solution]

John,
Once upon a time, far before LVM was introduced, was hard sectioning the only chance to split a disk into logical groups. Each section had it's own device file. The boot header of a disk was always in section 0. Since hp-ux 10.0 is hard sectioning no longer supported but you still find the ;0 in the boot string.
If you use LVM or an OS release of 10.0 or higher, you need not to bother with hard sectioning.