Booting another server with a removed mirror disk

[Dave Goodwin_1]

We have an rx2600 server with the 2 disks mirrored as boot disks. We'd like to be able to take one out permanently, and use it as a sort of template to boot, then mirror, other rx2600s we have in hand in order to get them running quickly.

Is there any way this could be done? The other rx2600s do not have any OS on them at present. We took a quick stab at reducing the mirror copies and reducing the VG, pulling the disk and moving to the other box. That did not seem to work, giving us an LVM panic when trying to boot it.

Any ideas would be welcome!

Dave

[RAC_1]

while you can do what you want, there are a lot of things you will have to take care of. You should rather look at Ignite product (free). It is exactly for the same purpose that you are working on.

Anil

[Pete Randall]

Dave,

I'm not exactly familiar with Itanium boxes but on RISC machines, the way to get this to work is to put the disk in the exact same slot from whence it came, other wise the LVM headers conflict with the address of the drive.


Pete

[TwoProc]

I'm guessing that your alternate bootable disk was not in fact bootable. Once you re-mirror those disks - look at the output of the "lvlnboot -v" command and see if in fact both disks are bootable. Also, examine the contents of the AUTO file from the boot_lif area and see if you've at least got an "hpux" command on it.

All that being said - ignite would be the way to go on this as RAC has pointed out to you.

[Dave Goodwin_1]

Thanks all. We are aware of Ignite but were hoping for something quick and dirty as the time to learn Ignite, set up a server, create images and push them out to the servers is in short supply.

I did place the disk in the same slot as it had been on the original server. That was of no help. Both disks were bootable, as I did chack that by booting each independently. In fact, it even seems to start to boot on the new box, going through the initial loader and such then dies with the aforementioned LVM panic.

We had mirrored following the HP documentation found here on the HP web site, and all that worked, and looked, fine.

Any other leads, please feel free to keep 'em coming :)

Dave

[Kent Ostby]

Dave -- By way of explanation, you paniced because you had removed the VG data structures from the disk.

So the system had enough data on it (the data is still there just not the LVM data structures) to try to boot, but didn't have the LVM data structures ... ergo an LVM panic.

There really isn't a "good" way to do this.

You could do something similar by creating a new boot disk on a system (you'd have two boot disks on that system, when you are booted off one, the other would be a "system" disk). Don't mirror this one.

Now .. pull it out. Take it toanother system and add another disk that has been pvcreated with -B option using the vgextend command and do all of the lvextends (in the proper order) and all of the lvlnboot commands.

Then reduce out your original boot disk. Take it back to the system you built it on and vgcfgrestore it's data structures ... then I believe you can do it all over again.

BUT,

a) you're not supported genning disks this way.

b) Ignite is still going to get you there faster in the long run.

[Tim D Fulford]

Ignite...

make_tape_recovery (I think "-vI -x inc_entire=vg00 -a /dev/rmt/0mn")

Take out tape put on other server, boot from tape, follow instructions... a couple of hours later you have a rx2600 with no conflicting IP address, LVM headders, and all those other things that "bit you in the a**" at a later date.

You will probably save more time by igniting to tape than going the "musical disk"route. If you do go the disks route you really need to know what you are doing... (like booting with hpux -lm -lq options)

Regards

Tim

[Steven E. Protter]

Ignite

make_tape_recvoery or
Golden images.

Right tools for this job.

http://www2.itrc.hp.com/service/james/dispDoc.do?docURL=http%3A%2F%2Fdocs.hp.com%2Fen%2FB2355-90153%2Fapcs08.html&aid=SEARCH_MANUAL&pil=5&serStr=Ignite+Golden+Image

SEP

[Sundar_7]

Dave,

When you are trying to boot the other machine using the mirror disk, you SHOULD disable the quorum.

Interrupt the autoboot and use -lq option with hpux to boot the kernel.

When you reduce the mirrors and reduce the VG, the LVM headers are also removed from the mirror disk.

So,mirror disk in the original system. Try to boot from the mirror disk in the original system. Make sure you are able to boot this node1 from the mirror disk.

Now, pull the mirror disk. Insert it in node2, boot with quorum disabled and see if this helps.

- Sundar.