make_recovery failure

[Chet Woods]

I have lost a disk at one of my remote sites and now am trying to restore from a make_recovery tape previously created. The HP tech onsite is actually doing the restore. Here's the problem I/we are getting. The restore was going for about 45 minutes (usually takes about an hour or so to fully recover)when he saw several I/O errors and then something like this:
Cannot load the OS archive (recovery archive)
The configuration process has incurred an error. It asks if I want to push a shell for debugging.
My problem is I do not or cannot create another make_recovery for the remote site to be back up today. Any suggestions would me much appreciated.


Thanks,
Chet

[Eileen Millen]

I got this error when I had not used the
norewind option for the tape on UX10.2
should be
make_recovery -vAC -d /dev/rmt/0mn
I had used
make_recovery -vAC -d /dev/rmt/0m
I could not read any files off of the tape either. You should be able to skip ahead one fileset and then read files with tar.

[Chet Woods]

Eileen,
I'm not sure if I understand what you mean. Is that skip where the tape is and go forward and use tar to get to the files?

Thanks,
Chet

[Patrick Wallek]

What happens if you answer 'No' to the push recovery shell question? I seem to recall that I had that problem one time, and I answered No and I think it tried to continue on.

I realize that it is probably hard to do, but if you have the exact I/O error messages that it showed, that may be helpful.

[Chet Woods]

Patrick,
If I type "no" it attempts to boot. It seems either yes or no it attempts to boot. Either way, it wont boot, there is no kernel there. I dont have the exact I/O errors but, it did come to a "pax_ux" prompt. I dont know if that helps at all. Also got an error similiar to this: archive file appears to be corrupt, cannot load OS archive.

Thanks,
Chet

[Eileen Millen · Accepted solution]

By default if you don't specify a drive, make_recovery uses 0mn with no rewind.
It writes the boot image (HP_UX LIF) 1st and then writes the archive in a second fileset on tape. You are supposed to be able to do
mt -t /dev/rmt/0mn fsf 1 (skip forward)
tar -xvf /dev/rmt/0m filename or path_to_file
to restore files from a successful make_recovery tape.
We use other SCSI IDs on our drives, thats how I got into trouble and didn't use the norewind option.
Another problem I had was that our /home directories on the system were over 2Gb and PAX doesn't handle that. I got the same result as you got. I had to do make_recovery in preview mode and then edit the config file /var/opt/ignite/recovery/arch.include
and remove all of the /home entries.
then do make_recovery -r (to use the new config file