Backup /image does not backup VMS$COMMON

[F. Boucher]

Hi to ALL! well, i did follow the advice of Steven Schweda, and did the following:
1) downloaded and applied with VMSINSTAL the ECO kit for backup4 that is referenced before.
2) applied the solution that is listed in appendix C of the ECO readme. Jan van den Ende and Volker Halle also references the same 4 commands, and I applied them exactly as Jan van den Ende listed them.

3) Did a BACKUP /IMAGE of the system disk, restored it on the target system (simulator) and succeeded!. The simulator did boot correctly with the restored disk image.

I am now quite satisfied with that.
I would like you all to warmly thank you for your most valuable help, as I resolved my problem, and from now on, I have a GOOD system disk backup.
We were, without knowing it, on the verge of an indescriptible crisis, if the system disk would have crashed, and the backup would not be usable for a restore!
Again, Thank you all for your help! and as Steven says, I will have one on him! cheers!

[Dean McGorrill]

>So, you DO have the VMS$COMMON - SYSCOMMON alias swithcing!

that was the reason I always kept a little
com file up in [0,0] on the system disk to
fix the file id. and I'd set default there
to run it. Dean

[John Gillings]

Francois,

The VMS$COMMON SYSCOMMON alias problem was quite common back in V5 (certainly more so than it is today). I consider it a design flaw, the original mistake was to call the "real" file VMS$COMMON and all the alises SYSCOMMON. If they'd all been given the same name, this particular error simply couldn't happen.

The RENAME method is correct when the backlink is correct (4,4,0) and the file name is incorrect. It does NOT work for other permutations (and there are many!).

For V5 systems, I recommend you create another alias in [000000] called SYSCOMMON.DIR with

$ SET DEFAULT DISK:[000000]
$ SET FILE/ENTER=SYSCOMMON.DIR VMS$COMMON.DIR

Leave SYSCOMMON.DIR on the disk, just in case the alias name flips again (things like an image restore using some versions of V5 BACKUP will change the filename). The advantage is, no matter which name gets into the file header, resulting filespecs will be valid. They'll just use the "incorrect" SYSCOMMON directory path instead of VMS$COMMON.

On later versions of OpenVMS, BACKUP is better at keeping the backlinks correct, ANALYZE/DISK will report it and we have DFU to fix it without those scary renames.