redundant boot drives with efi/gpt?

[Trever Furnish]

Reading the HP whitepaper on multi-booting different OSes on the Integrity line, there's a description of the way EFI/GPT work that has me troubled.

Does the use of EFI/GPT preclude the ability to have mirrored boot disks? Under HPUX+LVM+IPL, we can have mirrored boot disks and if one drive fails, we just boot off of the other drive.

The description HP provides for GPT says that it uses a partition on one disk to describe all the other partitions and volumes in the system. What if that disk goes bad?

[John Cheney_2]

Just saw this question and it is a good one. From this Microsoft source I would agree with your statement:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/proddocs/entserver/sag_DISKconcepts_17.asp

I'll have a look to see if I can find out if there are alternatives to provide redundant boot locations.

[John Cheney_2 · Accepted solution]

Check out this MS article:

HOW TO: Establish and Boot to GPT Mirrors on 64-Bit Windows [814070]

http://support.microsoft.com:80/support/kb/articles/Q814/0/70.asp

which should answer the question.

[support_5]

For HP-UX, attached doco on how to mirror root disk. Still haven't worked out the last bit yet on how to copy the HPSP partition.

The steps worked on my rx2600, HP-UX 11i v2.

[Trever Furnish]

Crap - I'd love to assign you 10 points for that one (though I can't yet test the solution), but the danged ITRC currently won't accept the "submit points" response. I'll try again in a bit.