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HP OpenVMS Systems Documentation

Content starts here Appendix J Alternative Ways to Initialize the System Disk
HP OpenVMS Version 8.4 Upgrade and Installation Manual

Appendix J Alternative Ways to Initialize the System Disk

The usual way to create a new OpenVMS system disk is to install OpenVMS with the INITIALIZE option. When you do this, the installation process responds as follows:

  • On OpenVMS Integrity server systems only, a diagnostic partition is created.

    The diagnostic partition is visible only from the console; it corresponds to the contents of SYS$MAINTENANCE:SYS$DIAGNOSTICS.SYS on the system disk. The partition is intended and reserved for use by HP Services (it is used with the HP IPF Offline Diagnostics and Utilities CD provided with the purchase of your Integrity servers). For more information about offline diagnostics, see your hardware documentation and the following website:

    http://docs.hp.com/hpux/diag

    HP recommends creating the system disk with this partition and not removing it. However, it is not required for operation of OpenVMS.

    If you do not want the diagnostic partition, you can prevent its creation by initializing the disk before installing OpenVMS, performing the steps in Section J.1. Alternatively, if you have already created the system disk and the partition, you can remove it by performing the steps in Section J.2.

  • The disk is initialized with volume expansion (INITIALIZE/LIMIT).

    This method of initialization (using the /LIMIT qualifier) might make your target system disk incompatible with versions of OpenVMS prior to 7.2. HP recommends that you create your system disk in the default manner unless you need to mount the disk on a version of OpenVMS prior to 7.2.

    You can avoid use of the /LIMIT qualifier by initializing your target system disk before you install OpenVMS, performing the steps in Section J.1. As a result of this alternate method, your new system disk might include a relatively large minimum allocation size (as defined by /CLUSTER_SIZE). Small files will use more space than would be used otherwise. Therefore, perform these steps only for system disks that must be mounted on versions of OpenVMS prior to Version 7.2.