[Info-vax] questions on initialize/gpt

[Dirk Munk]

Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2015-06-21, Dirk Munk <munk at home.nl> wrote:
>> I just read the chapter on the DCL initialize command, and there it says:
>>
>>>> When /GPT is specified, the system file [000000]GPT.SYS is created.
>> GPT.SYS contains partition/boot information needed by the IA64 console
>> software. (GPT is an abbreviation for GUID Partition Table, where GUID
>> stands for Global Unique Identifier.) <<
>>
>> That seems to suggest the disk gets a industry standard GUID Partition
>> Table, or not?
>>
>> But then you would expect to be able to take a partition on an existing
>>    disk with a GPT label, and format it with ODS-2 or ODS-5, but I can't
>> find any information on that.
>>
>> What is going on here?
>
> AIUI, (not actually having used IA-64 VMS) the GPT.SYS file is just
> a fake partition created by VMS $ init to allow the contents to be
> visible from the console.
>
> As such (since VMS doesn't support partitions) this means $ init has
> to do the whole thing and can't use any existing structures because
> it needs to create the fake partition once it knows where the space
> for the fake partition has been allocated within the ODS-2/ODS-5
> volume.
>
> The alternative would be for $ init to have code added to merge the
> existing partition into the newly allocated VMS ODS-2/ODS-5 structures
> during $ init. I imagine that's a lot more complicated than just
> creating a fake partition within the new ODS-2/ODS-5 volume.
>
> Simon.
>
OK, but for the boot disk there must be an EFI FAT32 partition 
somewhere, how is that done? Is it a container file on an ODS disk?