HP-RT System Recovery

[Robert Krebs]

HP-RT Recovery Tape
I'm working on a VME chassis with an HP-744 processor running HP-RT 3.01. It has two 9GB hard drives but only one (scsi 6) is used. I have no HP-RT recovery tape and, therefore, no way to recover from a fatal disk error. I need help with two things:

1.) Building a Recovery tape
I've tried this:

Boot in Single User Mode
# dd if=/usr/lib/rtbootlf of=/dev/rdds0n bs=2k
# sync;sync
# dd if=/dev/rsd6 of=/dev/rdds0 bs=64k
After ~2 hours I get:
I/O error
61,858+0 records in
61,857+1 records out

I'm assuming this is because my DDS2 tape is full, unfortunately we have no funding to upgrade any hardware or software - what we have is all we have!

2.) Making the unused scsi.5 a bootable duplicate of scsi.6.
I've tried the following:

# mkfs /dev/rsd5
# dd if=/usr/lib/rtbootlf of=/dev/rsd5 bs=2k
# sync;sync
# dd if=/dev/rsd6 of=/dev/rsd5 bs=64k

I lost system time after four hours and had to abort the command. The response said:
1057519+0 records in
1057519+0 records out

Other info:

df shows:
Filesystem BlkSize Blocks Used Free %
/dev/sd6a 4096 524288 77882 446406 14%

partition printout shows:
2222904 blocks currently partitioned
LIF area = 1024 blocks
Partition 1 * 2048 megabytes first block 1025
Partition 2 2048 megabytes first block 525313
Partition 3 2048 megabytes first block 1049601
Partition 4 2048 megabytes first block 1573889
Partition 5 487 megabytes first block 2098177

[harry d brown jr]

According to
http://www.interex.org/pubcontent/hpuxusr/jul96/11hprt/hprt.html

you have the creating of a boot tape correct.

What kind of tape drive are you using? It has to be able to hold more than 9GB + the size of your rtbootlf file.


live free or die
harry

[Pete Randall]

According to my config guide, a DDS 2 tape has a native capacity of 4 GB. That looks like a problem to me.

Pete

[harry d brown jr]

Pete,

Good catch, I missed the part describing the tape drive.

Robert,

You are going to need to get a newer tape drive, like a dds3. I don't think there is really another option :-(



live free or die
harry

[Pete Randall]

Robert,

You could try looking for a DDS 3 drive on e-bay or thru the resellers. That would be the cheapest way out unless you can borrow one from somebody.

Good luck,
Pete

[Robert Krebs]

On building a Recovery Tape:
Thanks to Harry and Pete for confirming my suspicions about needing another tape drive. We actually have a SureStore24 on site but no cables/adapters to hook it up. The system in question is on a Spanish Navy ship. I'm going back to the US for vacation next month and I plan on getting some cables there. It's a nightmare to be a stranger in a strange land (an American in Spain) where you have trouble with the language and can't deal with the cost of shipping and Customs fees from the US. Share my pain :(
The tape build procedure I was using came from the same document Harry provided in his link???cool!
Question: Since we're only using one partition (/dev/sd6a) of 2Gb can I use dd to copy only one partition instead of the entire raw device?

On duplicating the disk:
Same question as above, since we're only using one partition (/dev/sd6a) of 2Gb can I use dd to copy only one partition instead of the entire raw device?