Split off a Usable vg00 disk as Bootable fall back OS copy

[Alzhy]

My vg00 are all mirrored - 2 disks.

We need to do a quick DST2K7 check and I want to have a pristine copy of my OS so ti will not be littered with dates that are well into the future.

I had planned of dropping to just one disk - lvsplitting and vgreducing the other disk and just doing a dd copy of the remaining OS disk over.

However, is there a way to remove the mirror disk so it will still be bootable without resorting to a dd copy?

[Sundar_7]

Sure.

1) Shutdown the server. Pull the disk1 out.
2) Boot using disk2 by disabling the quorum
3) Test the DST changes
4) Shutdown. Pull out disk2 and put in disk1
5) Boot using disk1 with quorum disabled
6) insert the disk2 (assuming hot-swap)
7) Run vgchange -a y /dev/vg00
This will sync from disk1 to disk2.

[Court Campbell]

If you did a pvcreate with the -B option on the mirror disk then it made the pv bootable. you would have also had to do some extra commands to complete this process. Here is a link to the info on creating a mirror boot disk:

http://www2.itrc.hp.com/service/cki/search.do?category=c0&mode=id&searchCrit=allwords&docType=Security&docType=Patch&docType=EngineerNotes&docType=BugReports&docType=Hardware&docType=ReferenceMaterials&docType=ThirdParty&searchString=LVMKBRC00005103

But the answer is that if you split the mirror the disk will still be bootable. It will only have the data from the mirrored volumes up to the time of the split. My real suggestion would be to do an Ignite image using the "-x inc_entire=vg00". This will give you a bootable backup of your system.

[Torsten.]

Have a look into this
(dynamic root disk):

http://docs.hp.com/en/DRD/index.html

[TwoProc]

Yes, this works - just remember when you resync back - that you need to REVERSE which disk is being copied to which one. Since this is going to be a foreign idea to you, please make sure and get comfortable on a test server with this whole idea first!

I'd also make that "dd" copy to tape, and I'd ignite that server as well before I did this. Just to make sure.

Requirements before continuing.

a) practice this on test server
b) dd backup
c) ignite backup

[Alzhy]

Shutdown is not an option.

We're on 11.11. so DR Disk is not an option.

I guess dd or alternate vgroot is our only option then.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Nelson:

If you DST2K7 verification is for the standard libC libraries using the modified 'tzlib' simply use Clay's Perl script which leverages the standard libraries:

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1104045

Regards!

...JRF...