Disk Volume Header

On a SGI's ARCS systems all disks (even CD) must have a IRIX volume header vh(7M) and partitions. A typical IRIX bootable volume consists of the following partitions:

• Partition 0 - Root Filesystem partition.
• Partition 1 - Swap partition.
• Partition 7 - Volume Body partition.
• Partition 8 - Volume Header partition.
• Partition 10 - Whole Disk partition.

The Volume Header partition must start at the first sector on the disk. It contains the disk label in the first sector, and a rudimentary filesystem (readable by the PROM Monitor) in the rest of the partition.

DVH tools

• IRIX dvhtool
• Linux dvhtool
• Linux fdisk from util-linux
• GNU parted
• NetBSD sgivol
• genisovh Make CD-ROMs bootable for SGI MIPS machines