Using the Disk Open Utility for Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack Server

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What Is The DiskOpen Utility?

DiskOpen is a program that was developed in order to establish read/write privileges to a physical disk after FastBack Server Software has been installed.

When Should I Use DiskOpen?

After you install Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack Server software, any drive you attach to the FastBack server will need to be opened for read/write privileges before being used.

If you use the "Add Repository Wizard" to add a disk to the Repository, you can select to add the whole disk to the repository, and FastBack Manager will open the disk for read/write for you, so you do not have to perform the DiskOpen.

If you plan to add the volume (e:\(New Volume) in this case), you must use the DiskOpen utility.

Warning: Attaching a disk with existing data to the FastBack server is not recommended since the existing data might get corrupted.

What happens if DiskOpen is not run after attaching a new drive to the FastBack Server?

Any time you try to write data to the drive, all the data will go to the buffer, and though it may seem that data is being copied to the drive, if you restart your server the data will be gone (because it was never able to physically write the data to the drive). Depending on the amount of data written to the disk you might see some errors reported by the system, specifically "Delayed Write Failed" errors will be logged in the windows system event logs,

Other common side affects may include failure to initialize and format new disks.

How Do I Use DiskOpen?

The DiskOpen Utility must be run from the command line. DiskOpen has one argument, that is the disk number of the respective disk you want to open for read/write privileges. You can find the disk number in Windows Disk Management.

Right click on My Computer and choose Manage.
Expand the Storage menu and click on Disk Management.
From the screenshot below you can see the E drive (REP_E) is Disk number 1

There are two modes for this application: Regular mode, and Forever mode.
Regular mode opens the disk only once, and next time you restart your server that disk will no longer have write privileges. You will want to use this mode when temporarily adding a drive to the server, such as a USB drive.

Forever mode is used to permanently grant write privileges to that disk, and should be used when adding a new drive to the system. To use the forever mode you must put the following flag after the initial argument: "forever".

EXAMPLES:
Temporary write privileges are allowed:
DiskOpen 1

Forever write privileges are allowed:
DiskOpen 1 forever


Where can I get the DiskOpen utility?
In FastBack version 5.5.2 and later, the DiskOpen executable is located in the following directory:
C:\Program Files\Tivoli\TSM\FastBack\utilities

For older versions of FastBack, the utility must be obtained from the Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack Support team.


"DiskOpen N -forever" does not enable permanent write access to new disk
Review the following document if DiskOpen does not appear to be enabling permanent write access:
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21971392