Cloning SASD using dd on rx2660 with HP-UX 11.23 v2 0609

[ferrell.scott]

Hello,
I work on a program that has a requirement to clone primary drives for backup purposes. The previous server we cloned successfully was rx4640 (non-SASD) with HP-UX 11.23 v2 0609 installed. To do this, we booted from the v2 technical DVD 1 of 2 and ran the command “dd if=/dev/rdsk/c2t1d0 of=/dev/rdsk/c2t0d0 bs=1024k”. rx4640 servers are end-of-life so we began purchasing rx2660 and rx3600 servers (with SASD) and installing v2 0609 on them. I am told that we cannot upgrade to v3 yet because it does not support ATM, which we must continue to support. However, just to see if it would work, I installed v3 on a rx3600 primary SAS drive and attempted to boot from the backup SAS drive. This was successful. A side note, we have decided to remove the RAID controller from these servers.
The problem is that, on the rx2660 (and probably the rx3600) servers (with SASD) with v2 0609 installed, after we clone the primary SAS drive and attempt to boot from the backup SAS drive we receive "Please install the latest SerialSCSI-00 depot ASAP" which I found a fix for on http://docs.hp.com/en/5991-7528/5991-7528.pdf. The fix instructed me to install the SerialSCSI-00 depot from HP-UX 11.23 v2 Application Release 0612 DVD 1 of 2. I successfully installed the SerialSCSI-00 depot. The rx2660 automatically reset and then crashed once while attempting to boot the 1st time but successfully booted the 2nd time.
I cloned the primary SAS drive (with SerialSCSI-00 depot installed) and attempted to boot from the backup SAS drive but shortly after assigning the boot disk path and while assigning the console path the server crashed, attempted to boot up, and this would repeat over and over.
Please help. Thanks,
Scott

[Ganesan R · Accepted solution]

Hi,

There are many reasons for the system to crash. While software(OS) is the cause for system crash most of the time, but also due to hardware, application.

we need to find at which stage the system is crashing, and what is the exact change we made after the change.

If you have crashinfo string, it would be useful to find. Just check if system is generating crash directory under /var/adm/crash. If you have look into the file INDEX which gives informations upto some extend. If you are not able to find send the crash directory to HP for analyse. Ofcourse you need warrenty or software contract to involve HP.

[Andrew Rutter]

hi,

dd is to hit and miss. you would need to remove the disk and change the cloned disk into the primary disk slot to work successfully to? did you do this?

download and try this newish s/w and use this for root clones

http://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=DynRootDisk

DRD is designed exactly for your needs and can run on 11.23 or 11.31

you can even update the clone with patches and such like. It can also be done with the system online

Andy

[ferrell.scott]

When I compare the console messages displayed during boot-up between the primary SAS drive and the backup SAS drive, I find the differences below. I did a Google search for "ROOT device is a non-LVM partition, disallowed on LVM disk" and found 2+ people with this issue but the only suggestion was to use Ignite. Ignite is not an option. Since we successfully used dd on rx4640 v2 0609 and rx3600 v3 I have suspicion that the more recent rx2660 and rx3600 servers (with SASD) require some software (included in v3 but not in v2 0609) to be installed, perhaps LVM related. I would like to avoid installing future production rx2660 and rx3600 servers with the latest v2 (09??) because this will likely create problems with the software code developed by the program I work on.
Thanks,
Scott

primary SAS drive:
PERFMOM: Unrecognized Itanium-? Processing model [0x0000000000000020, 0x0000000000
Logical volume 64, 0x3 configured as ROOT
Logical volume 64, 0x2 configured as SWAP
Logical volume 64, 0x2 configured as DUMP
Swap device table: (start & size given in 512-byte blocks)
BLA BLA BLA â system boots

backup SAS drive:
PERFMOM: Unrecognized Itanium-? Processing model [0x0000000000000020, 0x0000000000
WARNING: ROOT device 0x1f0110002 is a non-LVM partition, disallowed on LVM disk.
WARNING: ROOT device 0x1f0110002 has been deconfigured (set to 0xffffffff).

----------------------------------------------
| |
| SYSTEM HALTING during LVM Configuration |
| |
|Non-lvm root on LVM disk |
|______________________________________________|

System Panic:

panic: LVM: Configuration failure
Stack Trace:
IP Function Name
0xe0000000011a1da0 lv_boothalt+0x110
0xe0000000011a9340 lv_check_boot+0x60
0xe0000000011a9230 lvmconf+0x2f0
0xe0000000011aedd0 im_lvmconf+0x70
0xe0000000015e47d0 DoCalllist+0x3a0
End of Stack Trace

linkstamp: Thu Apr 23 23:07:20 BST 2009
_release_version: @(#) $Revision: vmunix: B11.23_LR FLABOR=perf Fri Aug 29 2

syncâ ing disks (0 buffers to flush): (0 buffers to flush):
0 buffers not flushed
0 buffers still dirty

*** A system crash has occurred
ERROR: Your system crashed before I/O and dump configuration was complete.

[ferrell.scott]

Yes, I am aware of the need to place the backup drive into the primary drive slot location after cloning using DD.
We have used DRD in the past and have had issues, while DD has given us no issues. In addition, people in the field that support our systems are familiar with DD. For these reasons, we would like to continue use of DD.
Thanks,
Scott