VERITAS Volume Manager 3.1 Administrator's Guide

Disk Tasks
Initializing Disks
Chapter 4 157
Initializing Disks
There are two levels of initialization for disks in the Volume Manager:
Step 1. Formatting of the disk media itself. This must be done outside of the
Volume Manager.
Step 2. Storing identification and configuration information on the disk for use
by the Volume Manager. Volume Manager interfaces are provided to step
through this level of disk initialization.
A fully initialized disk can be added to a disk group, used to replace a
previously failed disk, or to create a new disk group. These topics are
discussed later in this chapter.
Formatting the Disk Media
To perform the first initialization phase, use the interactive format
command (on some systems, diskadd) to do a media format of any disk.
NOTE SCSI disks are usually preformatted.
For more information, see the formatting(1M) manual page.
Volume Manager Disk Installation
Use either the vxdiskadm menus or the vxdiskadd command for disk
initialization. This section describes how to use the vxdiskadd
command.
Use the vxdiskadd command to initialize a specific disk. For example, to
initialize the second disk on the first controller, use the following
command:
# vxdiskadd c0t1d2
The vxdiskadd command examines your disk to determine whether it
has been initialized and displays prompts based on what it finds. The
vxdiskadd command checks for disks that have been added to the
Volume Manager, and for other conditions.