Re: [PATCH] ignore partition table on disks with AIX label

[Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu]

On Wed, 17 May 2006 21:03:26 +0200, Olaf Hering said:
>  On Wed, May 17, Alan Cox wrote:
> > All we want to know initially is how to correctly spot AIX volumes. As I
> I dont have any more info about the layout.

I'm looking at the IBM header files on our AIX box.  Incidentally,
whoever "corrected" the spelling of EBCDIC should note that the same
exact typo is in the AIX /usr/include/sys/bootrecord.h I'm looking at. :)

As far as I can tell, the boot ROM snarfs up the first 512 byte block, and then
looks for the 'IBMA' magic cookie, then looks at offset 0x1BE for a
bog-standard 4-entry partition table, and a 0x55AA at offset 0x1FE.

Additionally, there will be an *ASCII* '_LVM' in the first 4 bytes of physical
512-byte block 7, denoting the start of the LVM control record.

I'd say if you find both the IBMA *and* _LVM cookies intact, you declare it
an AIX volume.

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