Noob At Volume Manipulation

[Torsten.]

You want to have a kind of "backup" of your boot disk? If you have 11.23 or above you should use DRD!

However, you should mirror your boot disk and do the "backup" on a third disk!

[J.Kimbrell]

Thx torsten, but no help, need to make an exact copy of primary disk, without mirroring, just want an exact copy.

Using all the suggest scripts, lifeboats are not working, can't see how they ever did, but trying an exact copy of syntax that they supply shows errors.

SO, the original question still stands, how to make an exact copy of a disk to another disk without mirroring.

[Torsten.]

>> dd if=/dev/vg00/lvol1 of=/dev/vg01/standb bs=8000


The system did what you told to do, create a file named /dev/vg01/standb.

If you do this kind of "copy", take vg00/rlvol1 as source, vg01/rlvol1 as destination (lvol to lvol).


Better use DRD, if you run 11.23 or 11.31!!!

[J.Kimbrell]

Thx torsten, did that with similar results.
Shows blocks copied, but I can't find where they went:

Filesystem kbytes used avail
/dev/vg00/lvol5 114688 26368 87696 23% /home

***************************************
/dev/vg01/lvol5b 114688 1206 106461 1% /homeb

dd if=/dev/vg00/lvol5 of=/dev/vg01/lvol5b bs=8000

No different in the file sizes, so, where did it actually go to?

[Patrick Wallek]

If you go back and re-read Clay's response in one of the threads provided, you will see that he does NOT do the 'dd' at the LVOL level. Rather, he does it disk-to-disk.

dd if=/dev/rdsk/c1t6d0 of=/dev/rdsk/c2t6d0 bs=8000k

This command will make an exact copy of disk c1t6d0 to disk c2t6d0.

If you just need an exact copy, then modify your dd accordingly.

If should look something like:

dd if=/dev/rdsk/c2t1d0 of=/dev/rdsk/c3t0d0 bs=8000k

Now if disk c2t1d0 goes down, you can replace it with the other disk and boot normally.

I would quit trying to muck with dd'ing from one LV to another.

[J.Kimbrell]

Hi Patrick,
Thx for the response.
I did the copy as you suggested and as was suggested in previous posts, however, going from /dev/vg00/lvol5 to /dev/vg01/homeb doesn't show anything other than a big old file under as showed earlier.

Shouldn't I be able to see something go to the other disk? Shouldn't I be able to see files on the destination disk?

Do I have to mount the destination disk?....like I said, noob at this and I'm not getting any decent help here. Sorry guys, but it is what it is...

[Torsten.]

>> going from /dev/vg00/lvol5 to /dev/vg01/homeb


I already told you, this is wrong.

You copy the LVOL to a file.



What is your OS version???

[J.Kimbrell]

Maybe I'm missing something, I don't want to copy a directory to a file, I want to copy it to another disk using "dd".

My OS is; HP-UX ptcsrv3 B.11.23

Also, when I try:
# dd if=/dev/rdsk/c2t1d0 of=/dev/rdsk/c3t0d0 bs=8000
dd read error: Invalid argument
0+0 records in
0+0 records out

Wow, my ignorance is frustrating.

[Torsten.]

I would try this:

# drd clone -p -v -t /dev/dsk/c3t0d0

(if c3t0d0 is your empty disk)


This makes a (bootable!) clone of the current boot disk. (-p is for preview)

[Torsten.]

The advantage of DRD:

You can boot this clone directly, you can even install patches on the inactive image or mount it easily.

The disadvantage of "dd":

You cannot boot this disk without change the slot or adjust the LVM configuration, you cannot (should not) even mount it without changing the VG id.