What is a volume layout disk?

[Andre Stewart]

Just that simple question: What is a volume layout disk?

I am aware one uses the "mkbook -l" command to define a boot disk (or it's mirror drive) as such, but exactly what is it?

[Duncan Edmonstone]

A volume layout disk is one that has a LIF area with a LABEL file.

The LABEL file is where all the important offsets for the starting blocks for root, boot, swap and dump are written by the lvlnboot command... allowing HP-UX to bootsrap itself off LVM partitions before the LVM subsystem has been enabled...

HTH

Duncan

[SoorajCleris]

Hi,


From the manpage.

-l

This option is valid only for series 800 boot
programs.If this option is used, mkboot
treats device as an LVM physical volume regardless of whether or not it is currently
set up as one.

================================
This command will install the bootfiles to BDRA ( boot data reservd area). It install hpux utility, create LABEL file, AUTO file so on.

-l is used to consider the disk as LVM disk.


Regards,
Sooraj

[Rahul Rai_1 · Accepted solution]

Hi Andre,

If I am understanding your question correctly then answer would be like this,

-There are two kinds of LVM disk layouts, one for boot disks and another for all other LVM disks

Non Bootable disks have two reserved areas

1) PVRA
2) VGRA

Bootable disk have

1) PVRA
2) VGRA
3) third sector reserved for the BDRA and boot LIF

BDRA information is maintained by lvlnboot and lvrmboot commands,

Regards,
Rahul Rai

[Ismail Azad]

Rahul,

To define a boot disk we use the -B option in pvcreate. Besides the normal reserved areas when the system boots, after PDC/IODC runs, the components of the LIF area come into the picture wherein after the default boot path has been obtained from stable storage, ISL utility looks for an autoexecute file and then runs HPUX / hpux.efi depending on the architecture of the server. These utilities comprise of the LIF area. At the end of the day volume disk layout categorizes to if the disk is bootable/not and the structures present on the boot/non boot disk. The other areas which are not mentioned in the previous answers are VGSA, VGDA, MCR.

Regards

[Andre Stewart]

Thank you all!! Great explainations.