Managing Systems and Workgroups: A Guide for HP-UX System Administrators

Administering a System: Managing Disks and Files

Managing Disks

Chapter 6 569

On HP Integrity Servers, make sure to use the device ﬁle with the s2

sufﬁx, as that represents the HP-UX partition on the disk. On HP 9000

(PA-RISC) systems, use the device ﬁle without a partition number.

Use a physical volume’s raw device ﬁle for these two tasks only:

• When creating a physical volume. Here, you use the device ﬁle for

the disk. For example, this might be /dev/rdsk/c3t2d0 if the disk

were at card instance 3, target address 2, and device number 0. (The

absence of a section number beginning with s indicates you are

referring to the entire disk.)

• When restoring your volume group conﬁguration.

For all other tasks, use the block device ﬁle. For example, when you add a

physical volume to a volume group, you use the disk’s block device ﬁle for

the disk, such as /dev/dsk/c5t3d0.

For more information on device ﬁle names, see Conﬁguring HP-UX for

Peripherals.

All disk device ﬁles are created automatically when you boot the system,

after you have physically added the disk. Refer to insf (1M) for more

information.

Naming Volume Groups

When choosing a name for a volume group, the name must be identical to

the name of a directory you have created under /dev. (See Steps 3 and 4

under “Example: Creating a Logical Volume Using HP-UX Commands”

on page 575.) The name can have up to 255 characters.

Each volume group must have a unique name. For example, typical

volume group names could be vg01, vgroot, or vg_sales. Although the

name does not have to start with vg, this is highly encouraged. Often,

these names take the form: /dev/vgnn. When assigned by default, the

number nn starts at 00 and proceeds 01, 02, and so on, in the order that

volume groups are created. By default, your root volume group will be

vg00 although this name is not required; see “Creating Root Volume

Group and Root and Boot Logical Volumes” on page 578 later for more

information on the root volume group.