Formatting DASD Partitions

After the kernel loads the DASD driver and detects your DASD devices, you will be asked to format them. All newly created partitions should be formatted. In addition, any existing partitions that contain data you no longer need should be formatted. The DASD format program will format all selected DASD's simultaneously, therefore the formatting should only take a as long as the largest DASD partition. Note: A 2 GB DASD partition could take upwards of 20 minutes to complete.

Further, if data DASD partitions such as /home or /usr/local have been added from another system, be sure not to format them if they contain data you wish to keep.