VERITAS Volume Manager 3.5 Administrator's Guide (September 2002)

Chapter 7, Creating Volumes
Initializing and Starting a Volume
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Initializing and Starting a Volume
A volume must be initialized if it was created by the vxmake command and has not yet
been initialized, or if the volume has been set to an uninitialized state.
Note If you create a volume using the vxassist command, vxassist initializes and
starts the volume automatically unless you specify the attribute init=none.
To initialize and start a volume, use the following command:
# vxvol start volume
When creating a volume, you can make it immediately available for use by specifying the
-b option to the vxassist command, as shown here:
# vxassist -b make volume length layout=mirror
The -b option makes VxVM carry out any required initialization as a background task. It
also greatly speeds up the creation of striped volumes by initializing the columns in
parallel.
As an alternative to the -b option, you can specify the init=active attribute to make a
new volume immediately available for use. In this example, init=active is specified to
prevent VxVM from synchronizing the empty data plexes of a new mirrored volume:
# vxassist make volume length layout=mirror init=active
Caution There is a very small risk of errors occurring when the init=active attribute
is used. Although written blocks are guaranteed to be consistent, read errors
can arise in the unlikely event that fsck attempts to verify uninitialized space
in the file system, or if a file remains unitialized following a system crash. If in
doubt, use the -b option to vxassist instead.
The following command can be used to enable a volume without initializing it:
# vxvol init enable volume
This allows you to restore data on the volume from a backup before using the following
command to make the volume fully active:
# vxvol init active volume
If you want to zero out the contents of an entire volume, use this command to initialize it:
# vxvol init zero volume