Choosing between PARTIAL and NEW

The Partial and New settings allow you to preserve some or all of your existing data set assignments. Choosing between these two settings requires careful consideration of your existing volumes. Usually, the best choice is the one that creates the least work for you.

Both Partial and New cause the dialog to automatically assign new data sets and preserve some or all of your current assignments. Partial preserves your existing assignments, except for those volumes that you choose to make available for reassignment (through the eXclude line command). New preserves all of your existing assignments.

The advantage of Partial over New is increased flexibility. New does not allow you to move volumes or rename them before you enter the CReate command (as you can with All or Partial).

If you have used the Recommended System Layout option before, the dialog displays volumes in sequence number order. Otherwise, the New setting simply displays the IPL volume first, if there is one in the configuration, and places remaining volumes in alphanumeric order. The dialog always attempts to assign data sets to volumes in the order in which they are displayed. Once they are used for automatic assignment, each volume will have a sequence number. If you need to move or rename volumes, it is recommended that you use All or Partial. (If you choose New and then need to rename volumes so that they show up in the order you want, you must follow the procedures described at the end of this topic.)

In choosing between New or Partial, consider whether you have used the Recommended System Layout option before. If so, use New when both of the following conditions are true:

You used All in the past and you want to continue placing new data sets according to the Recommended System Layout.
Your volumes have enough space to ensure that new data sets will be logically grouped with existing data sets of the same element type.

You should also use New if you do not want existing data sets to be moved and you do not want to place the new ones yourself.

In all other cases, choose All or Partial instead of New.

If you are reusing a saved configuration and you have not used the Recommended System Layout option before, the NEW setting offers the most benefit when your existing configuration follows the IBM® recommended system layout that is described in the topic, "Recommended Data Set Placement," in z/OS Planning for Installation, and your volumes have adequate free space. If you have already gone through the effort of manually creating a Recommended System Layout configuration and have sufficient free space on the volumes, you should use the New path.

The first time you use automatic assignment, the dialog will assume that volumes are named using an ascending alphanumeric naming pattern (such as OSRES1, OSRES2, … or OSRESA, OSRESB, …) when assigning sequence numbers for automatic assignment. Therefore, if you have not used automatic assignment before and your target volume names do not follow an ascending alphanumeric naming pattern, you should rename the volumes before using the New path, and then rename the volumes to their original names afterward, as listed below:

Before using Recommended System Layout, enter the SUMP command to display the work configuration's physical volumes. In the display, rename the target volumes to names that would ensure that the volumes would appear in the proper sequence when sorted alphanumerically.
In Recommended System Layout, choose the New setting and create the new configuration. The volumes will be assigned sequence numbers.
Display the volumes in the new configuration. Change the target volume names back to what you want them to be. The dialog will preserve this volume sequence for subsequent installations regardless of the volume names, until you choose to no longer preserve the volumes (for example, by excluding them during a subsequent PARTIAL automatic assignment).