idisk.1m (2011 03)
i
idisk(1M) idisk(1M)
(Integrity Systems Only)
may carry a suffix of ’K’, ’M’, or ’G’ to represent kibibytes, mebibytes, or gibibytes, respectively.
Partition Description File
The first entry in the partition description file is the number of partitions to create. The maximum
number of partitions allowed is 12. This is followed by a line containing the type and size for each of the
partitions.
Recognized partition types are: EFI, HPUX,
HPDUMP, and HPSP.
The EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) partition type is used for the HP-UX bootloader and other pro-
grams and data that are used to boot HP-UX. The HPUX partition type is used as the storage area for
the root volume group and swap/dump (the root VG and swap/dump space may include other storage, as
well). The HPSP partition type is used for storage of offline firmware updates and diagnostics. HPDUMP
is deprecated.
At least one EFI partition is required to create a valid partition table. Size may be specified in megabytes
or as a percentage of the whole disk.
Internally,
idisk creates the partitions whose size is specified in MB first then creates those whose size
was specified as a percentage. Those partitions specified as a percent are assigned space from what is
available after the MB partitions are created. If the size of a partition is specified as 100%, then all space
remaining is assigned to that partition.
idisk may allocate slightly less space than requested for the EFI partition on a disk containing both an
EFI and an HP-UX data partition. This is done to adjust the starting position of the HP-UX data parti-
tion to align to common RAID stripe sizes (even on non-RAID disks). This behavior may be prevented by
adding the keyword ’EXACT’ to the EFI partition specification in the partition description file.
An example partition description file is shown below:
2
EFI 100MB
HPUX 100%
The first entry specifies the number of partitions to create. The second specifies an EFI partition of 100
megabytes. The last entry specifies a HPUX partition consisting of all the remaining space on the disk
after the EFI partition has been created.
When creating partitions, the device file name must be that of the whole disk. Legacy device files must
not have any partition number bits set in the minor number. For legacy disk devices, the last eight bits of
the minor number represent the option bits.
For Integrity system disks, the last four option bits are used to indicate the partition number. Since there
are only four bits for partition number, only one to fifteen partitions are supported. For example, a device
node with a minor number of 0x008001 would indicate a disk at target eight, partition number one. A
minor number of 0x00500F would indicate a disk at target 5 partition fifteen. A minor number with no
partition bits set would indicate the whole disk (for example, 0x008000 would be the same disk as above
but represent the whole disk and not a partition).
Persistent device special files do not use or contain minor number information. A detailed description on
persistent device special files can be found in intro (7). Note: For partitions created by
idisk,device
special files must be created for each legacy hardware path to the disk and for the LUN hardware path
using insf or mksf (see intro (7) for details on legacy and agile modes). If legacy mode is disabled (see
the description of the -L option in rmsf(1M)), device special files must only be created for the LUN
hardware path.
Note
idisk has been ported to Windows NT 4.0 and 2000.
RETURN VALUE
Exit values are:
0 Successful completion.
>0 Error condition occurred.
EXAMPLES
Create the partitions specified in the above description file, printing only the primary partition informa-
tion:
2 Hewlett-Packard Company − 2 − HP-UX 11i Version 3: March 2011