Appendix I Alternative Ways to Initialize the System Disk

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

This method of initialization (using the /LIMIT qualifier) may 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 described in “Alternative Method of Initialization”.

On OpenVMS I64 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 server). For more information about offline diagnostics, see your hardware documentation and the following Web site:

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 described in “Alternative Method of Initialization”. Alternatively, if you have already created the system disk and the partition, you can remove it by performing the steps described in “Removing the Diagnostic Partition File (I64 Only)”.