how to migrate disks to different system

[John Henrikson]

Hello,
I have a situation where an old visualize C180 system will not boot up. When its powered up nothing comes up on the screen; I figure it must be a bad processor or motherboard.. Its no longer under maintenace.. The user has a ton of data in 2 external cabinets housing about 10 hard drives. On the old system these were all arranged in one logical volume.
Can anyone give me some advice on how to move this data to a differeent system?
I very much appreciate it!!

John Henrikson

[Pete Randall]

John,

You'll need to have some knowledge of the layout as it was on the old system in order to use vgimport to rebuild the VG's on the new host (this assumes that they were separate VG's - not part of VG00). Do a man on vgimport.

Pete

[John Henrikson]

I've got the old layout.. thanks..

[Ken Hubnik_2]

You can use vgexport and create a mapping of the disk layouts that you can then use on the vgimport command on the other system.

[John Henrikson]

How could I use vgexport? the old system is DEAD.. it won't boot at all.. nothing on the console..?

[Pete Randall]

John,

Well then, if you've got the old layout it's just a matter of connecting the cabinets and doing vgimport like so:

vgimport -v /dev/vg01 /dev/dsk/c0t1d0 /dev/dsk/c0t3d0

Hope this helps,
Pete

[John Henrikson]

so I would connect the external drives, reboot.. But wouldn't I need to do a pvcreate snd vgcreate? and wouldn't this destroy the data on the drives?
thanks!

[Pete Randall]

John,

I'm home and have no reference materials so take this with a grain of salt:

You don't need to create anything (no vgcreate, pvcreate, nothing). The lvm structures are already present on the disk. You will need to create the directory for the vg device files, like

mkdir /dev/vg02

Then you need to create the special file, like

mknod /dev/vg02 c 64 0x020000

Then you issue the vgimport command and identify the device files that make up the VG.

That's from memory but it should be close. Check the man pages, for vgimport in particular.

I'll check tomorrow to see if you have further questions.

Pete

[Pete Randall · Accepted solution]

John,

I just knew I'd leave something out:

mkdir /dev/vg01
mknod /dev/vg01/group c 64 0x010000
vgimport -v /dev/vg01 /dev/dsk/c0t1d0 /dev/dsk/c0t3d0


Substitute your values for vg01 and for /dev/dsk/cNtNdN.

Good luck,
Pete