Ron,
What "starter system" are you using?
OS/VS1 was meant for the lower end of the 370 family, and starter systems generally had a minimal configuration of devices (tapes, disk drives, etc.) anyway.
How many disks are you trying to initialize?
You should be able to just create the virtual disks and initialize them "in one go" by using the Hercules "dasdinit" command.
Hope that helps,
Mark S. Waterbury
