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Re: HPUX hard drive clone - special case

 
mohsenof
Occasional Contributor

HPUX hard drive clone - special case

Hi EveryOne I have a HP9000 rp3410 server with HPUX 11iv1 on it. Now I want to clone its single hard drive. I may need it in case of hard failure...

 

But the problem is I have no other identical hard drives, no other unix-based servers (to use as Iginte-UX server), not even one tape... and maybe the most important: I have limited knowledge in unix world.

 

The server has USB port, LAN interface and a DVD-Rom

 

Any thing that can help me is really appreciated. Regards

6 REPLIES 6
Shibin_2
Honored Contributor

Re: HPUX hard drive clone - special case

>> But the problem is I have no other identical hard drives

 

What do you mean by? 

 

Standard offering comes with 2 hard disks.  If the system configured as per the recommended method, then your root volume must be mirrored.

 

Do vgdisplay vg00 and lvdisplay < to lvs in root volume> to determine this.

Regards
Shibin
mohsenof
Occasional Contributor

Re: HPUX hard drive clone - special case

Thank you for quick response

 

 

My server has just one hard drive

I checked it.

 

 

And I said "I have no other identical hard drives" because if I had another identical hard disk, I could create a clone using 'dd' command on the second hard disk. Or at least this is what I've read on internet.

Matti_Kurkela
Honored Contributor

Re: HPUX hard drive clone - special case

The USB port is useless for two reasons.

 

First, there are no USB Mass Storage drivers for HP-UX 11iv1. Only 11iv2 and newer can have support for USB storage devices.

 

Second, even if you used some workarounds (e.g. piping the data over the network to some Linux system) to successfully write an image of the system disk to a USB device, the rp3410 server simply won't boot from a USB device at all: there is no firmware-level support for booting from USB. So recovery after a disk failure would also require clumsy workarounds.

 

In my opinion, your current situation is simply unacceptable for any serious production use: you have no reliable way to recover after a disk failure at all. And a disk failure is the most common failure mode on server systems... :-(

 

The rp3410 has an external SCSI connector, to which you could plug in a tape drive (usually a DAT/DDS drive). With the PA-RISC servers like rp3410, the Ignite-UX tape was/is the standard solution for bare-metal recovery of a single isolated HP-UX system. All rp series servers can definitely boot from a standard tape drive. The Ignite-UX software package includes the "make_tape_recovery" command, which can be used to create a full, bootable backup of the system disk. This would make recovery quite simple: replace the failed disk (the new disk does not need to be identical), insert the Ignite tape, interrupt the autoboot sequence and tell the system to boot from tape, and when the Ignite menu appears, just select the default option to restore everything to exactly as it was when the tape was made. (You would also have the option to adjust logical volume sizes, if you needed to.)

 

Alternatively, you could get two new disks, and clone the existing system disk to both. From that point on, you would keep one of the copies safe while re-cloning the system on the other disk.

MK
mohsenof
Occasional Contributor

Re: HPUX hard drive clone - special case

Thank you

 

Unfortunately I don't have easy access to similar hard drives or even tapes.

So, what I want to do is to unplug the hard drive from the server, connect it to a usual PC, and create an image of it by usual imaging tools (acronis, etc) on a PC hard drive.

 

I think this is a practical solution for my situation.

 

 

Thanks again

Bill Hassell
Honored Contributor

Re: HPUX hard drive clone - special case

Be very careful about 'imaging' software for PCs. They usually assume that the disk belongs to a PC so the first sectors may not be copied exactly.  HP-UX (and other flavors of 'nix) have the dd command which accurately copies disk-to-disk. After using the PC tools, be sure to test the copied disk. It will be too late if you wait for a failure and find out the copy won't boot.



Bill Hassell, sysadmin
mohsenof
Occasional Contributor

Re: HPUX hard drive clone - special case

Good advice!

 

Thank you