Veritas Volume Manager 5.0 Administrator's Guide (September 2006)

100 Administering disks
Rootability
Using vxdiskadd to place a disk under control of VxVM
As an alternative to vxdiskadm, you can use the vxdiskadd command to put a disk
under VxVM control. For example, to initialize the second disk on the first controller, use
the following command:
# vxdiskadd c0t1d0
The vxdiskadd command examines your disk to determine whether it has been
initialized and also checks for disks that have been added to VxVM, and for other
conditions.
Note: If you are adding an uninitialized disk, warning and error messages are displayed on
the console during the
vxdiskadd command. Ignore these messages. These messages
should not appear after the disk has been fully initialized; the
vxdiskadd command
displays a success message when the initialization completes.
The interactive dialog for adding a disk using vxdiskadd is similar to that for
vxdiskadm, described in “Adding a disk to VxVM” on page 95.
Rootability
Rootability indicates that the volumes containing the root file system and the system
swap area are under VxVM control. Without rootability, VxVM is usually started after the
operating system kernel has passed control to the initial user mode process at boot time.
However, if the volume containing the root file system is under VxVM control, the
kernel starts portions of VxVM before starting the first user mode process.
Under HP-UX, a bootable root disk contains a Logical Interchange Format (LIF) area. The
LIF LABEL record in the LIF area contains information about the starting block number,
and the length of the volumes that contain the stand and root file systems and the
system swap area. When a VxVM root disk is made bootable, the LIF LABEL record is
initialized with volume extent information for the stand, root, swap, and dump (if
present) volumes.
See “Setting up a VxVM root disk and mirror” on page 102 for details of how to configure
a bootable VxVM root disk from an existing LVM root disk.
Note: From the AR0902 release of HP-UX 11i onward, you can choose to configure either
a VxVM root disk or an LVM root disk at install time. See the HP-UX Installation and
Configuration Guide for more information.
See the chapter “Recovery from Boot Disk Failure” in the Veritas Volume Manager
Troubleshooting Guide, for information on how to replace a failed boot disk.