Re: EMC DMX3-1500 and REFORMAT VTOC

What I have been told is that z/OS no longer uses the alternate tracks, so
the reformat removes them from the VTOC.

Frankly, I haven't looked into this deep enough to know how you would ever
get a "bad" track since there is so little use of real 3390 disk volumes
anymore to cause z/OS to try and use an alternate track in the VTOC.

Tom Moulder


-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Michael Bradley
Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2007 9:55 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: EMC DMX3-1500 and REFORMAT VTOC

John,

==========================
…we are expanding our storage by about 1.5TB and moving to a DMX3…
…as part of this process EMC is stating that we need to do a
REFORMAT VTOC across our farm…
…have not been able to pin the whys and hows down…
…might someone have the whys and hows?
==========================

It's likely that this is insurance against volumes that don't conform to
the conventional physical layout, particularly where alternate tracks are
concerned.

Michael



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