Copying one disk to another for backup

[Donald Lalonde]

Hi,

I have a new server with two disks.
The primary boot disk is C2T0D0 (VG00).
I want to make modifications to this disk but I don't have a tape backup.

So, I would like to make a copy of this disk to the secondary disk (C2T1D0). They are both the same size and type.

What is the easiest way to do this?

I'm using HP-UX 11.23 on an RP4440 server

Thanks

[Victor Fridyev · Accepted solution]

Hi,

If you see both disks with ioscan,
you can back up disk->disk by dd:
#> dd if=/dev/rdsk/XXXX of=/dev/rdsk/YYYY bs=32768k

XXXX is the existing system disk, YYYY is it's backup.

If you want to undo modifications, you will have to replace physically disks and to boot from the backup. The process requires fsck.

HTH

[Donald Lalonde]

Great. Thanks.

If I need to boot from the backup, do I need to add any boot information to the disk or can I just swap the disk and go?

[nanan]

Hi!
If you use DD command for backupdisk
you can boot the backup disk but before you try to boot you have to replace the backup disk to original disk
i mean you need to relocate the disks

Addition, If you want to get backup OS disk
you'd batter using Mirror UX then hard copy like that.
The Mirror UX SW make you configure mirror OS and even data vgs
you don't need to relocate physical disk location.

Regards
nanan

[Donald Lalonde]

Thanks Nathan,

I don't mind changing the disks around.
They are at the front of the server and are easily accessible. So, a switch is pretty easy.

So, the DD command will copy everything... including system files and hidden directories?

I'm going to try it right now.

Thanks for the help.
Don

[IT_2007]

Didn't understand your question

>>>The primary boot disk is C2T0D0 (VG00).
I want to make modifications to this disk but I don't have a tape backup.

You have one boot disk and if you have mirror/UX software installed then add another disk as a mirror and boot from it.

Or

dd command will copy everything. Make sure that it is bootable.

lifcp /dev/rdsk/alternate:AUTO -

should show

hpux

[Donald Lalonde]

Thanks guys, the dd command worked and I now have two copies of the primary disk.

I was able to boot from the second disk.