HP UX Volume Labelling

[Matthew Brailey]

Where and how does HP-UX mark a physical device to indicate that it is an HP-UX
device. I am looking for specifics in terms of cylinder - track - sector
location and specifically what string is used to ID the OS version. Any help
is appreciated.

[Dan Hull]

Are you talking about disk volumes? The pvcreate marks the disk as a disk
device for the OS to recognize it as usable.

I don't think anything is written to the disks regarding the OS version.

[Carlos Riera]

Hi all:

Since Hp-UX 10.00 is not habitual the use of partitioned disks, instead we use
LMV software.

i think you are looking for a disk layout, but i have nerver seen that.

Some Information about lif area is in man lifinit. Also man boot can be useful
for you.

Regards.

[Matthew Brailey]

My question pertains to physical drives from the host perspective. I don't
care at all about logicals. I know in MPE/iX, (another HP OS) drives are
labelled at Sector 0 Track 0 byte positions 2-7 The string that labes the
drive is HPESYS which denotes that it is an MPE/iX device. I am lookig for
similar information to that.

[Carlos Riera]

Hi once again:

LVM software writes its mark on disks.

try :
dd if=$disk bs=1024 skip=8 count=1 | dd bs=8 count=1

May show LVMREC01.

There is another mark for boot devices:

dd if=/dev/rdsk/$disk bs=1024 count=1 of=/tmp/xx

( hex dump )

x0 x1 x2 x3 x4 x5 x6 x7 x8 x9 xa xb xc xd xe xf
0123456789abcdef


00: 80 00 49 53 4c 31 30 20 00 00 02 40 10 00 00 00 ..ISL10
...@....


/etc/magic searchs:

0 short 0x8000 lif file



Of course this an absolute unssuport response.

[Steve White_8]

The pvcreate command writes LVM information in the first Physical extent of
the hard disk. If you are analyzing the disk for logical volume layout then you
would type:

pvdisplay -v /dev/dsk/cxtxdx |more

If you are trying to find out if the logical volumes on your system are
fragmented then type:

lvdisplay -v /dev/vg01/lvol1 |more

There are two columns of concern in the output of the lvdisplay command. You
want to ensure physical extents are contiguous. The columns to watch have
headers of PV1 and PE1.