Copy of HP11 system disk

[Peter Godron]

I have a HP11 system which is unreliable due to io errors on the system disk and can crash at a moments notice or stay up for 3 hrs.
Have got a spare unformatted disk on the system, but no tape drive.
What is the best procedure to make a copy of the system disk - without MirrorDisk or Ignite ?
The system volume group also has other stuff in it and is 26GB in size.
Would dd do the trick ?
What is the process (Add the new disk, create new vg and lvols, then do the dd)

[Bharat Katkar]

I think there is no need to create vg,lvols.
Before u proceed for anything make map file for vg00 on safer side.
Simply add the disk, locate the same using
#ioscan -fnC disk
suppose it is /dev/dsk/c0t0d1
and your existing disk which is suspected bad under vg00 is /dev/dsk/c0t0d0
then you have to:

#dd if=/dev/dsk/c0t0d0 of=/dev/dsk/c0t0d1

see man dd before u proceed.
Then try replacing c0t0d0 with c0t0d1 and boot. This should hopefully work.
This will like a mirror image of your existing disk.

[Bernhard Mueller]

Peter,

if you have disks of the same size you may give dd a try.

The alternative would be to create another VG with the unused disk and copy everything from you current boot disk.

I am attaching sample script, that you would have to adjust for lvol sizes, lvol names etc, and add a couple more mkdir, mount, newfs, find and cpio if you want to have the same lvols as today.

Regards,
Bernhard

[KapilRaj]

You may go for an ignite solution but by nature I do not like that..

Why don't you try booting into LVM maintanance move and copy all the boot disk lvols to the new disk and compensating with lvlnboot ?

Regds,

Kaps

[David Hausman]

Similar to Bernhard's example we create an "alt root" copy of vg00 and use it as a point in time back up. HP does not like to acknowledge this method, but it has come in handy! If you have the extra disk to spare, and you already have a mirror copy, it may save you one day.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

The dd method will work. I would use the character devices (rdsk) rather than the block devices (dsk) and you will also want a larger than default block size or the copy will take a long time.

Something like this:
dd if=/dev/rdsk/c0t6d0 of=/dev/rdsk/c0t5d0 bs=256k

It's best that you do this with as little activity gpoing on as possible. Also, because these are live filesystems, an fsck will be required on the boot. Your destination disk needs to be at least as large as your source disk -- identical is greatly preferred.

[Bill Hassell]

Before wasting time copying the data onto another disk, look at the file file /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log to see if there are disk errors. If not, what you will end up with (after copying the disk) will be the same system, probably still crashing. If you haven't added any patches after the initial installation, don't do any additional work until you have added the HWE and QPK bundles of patches. Then see if your system stops crashing.

Another possibility is that you have a CPU hardware failure, and that will have to be fixed before the system will be reliable.

[Peter Godron]

Many Thanks to everybody.
Problem was down to hardware.
In the end it was quicker to rebuild the machine and rescue what I could from the old disk.
Will insist on mirroring from now on!!