HPUX recovery issues using Ignite

[Prashant Gawde]

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am lost. Please help me!

I am trying to restore a system using Ignite (from a tape backed up 2-3 years back). It restored earlier, but now it is not. The only difference between now and then was that I used up all the empty space to create a folder.

It is taking for ever at "Archive extraction from tape is begining. Please wait." (This is my 4th attempt to restore).

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

How long is forever? How long did it take the first time?

The tar extract can take a while. It is basically taking EVERYTHING off of the tape and putting it back onto the system.

[Prashant Gawde]

Patrick. I greatly appreciate your response. The operation started at 13:46 and now it is 14:53 (more than an hour).

Also, do you think it might be the newly created partition that might be causing the issues?

Thank you

[Patrick Wallek]

How long did it take to do the restore before?

Creating a new LV within Ignite using the remaining space shouldn't make any difference.

If you try again, I would leave the configuration as it is on the tape. Don't change it and see what happens.

If you need an additional LV, create it after the Ignite restore is finished.

[Prashant Gawde]

Once again, appreciate your response.

Finally it rebooted without doing anything further. And rebooted again after trying to auto-boot. This time it stopped the boot process on its own and came to the menu which lets you select the Commands such as BO, SEA, PA, etc.

Can I come out of this recovery and boot into my last good boot?

If not, how can I go beyond this condition?

Thank you

[Mel Burslan]

A tape 2-3 years old may have gone bad as you did not specify how long ago your server booted off of this tape.

If the server came down to the main menu without you touching a key at the initial 10 second period does not mean much unless there were some console error messages prior to coming to this point. If there were no other errors, it means that, your server is not set to autoboot upon a CPU reset or shutdown. This can be changed by going into the configuration selection on this menu.

But right now, when you do this at the menu prompt:

SEA IPL

if it goes out and comes back with nothing or does not return the tape as one of your selections, you may as well forget about booting off of this tape.

[Prashant Gawde]

You guys are very nice. Appreciate your response Mel.

I can get back to my system by:
bo p2

But at reboot (again), it comes and stop at the MAIN MENU for me to enter the "bo p2" again. Where should I go and change the default boot into my P2 (with the option of stoping it withing the 15 second period)?

Thank you.

[erics_1]

Prashant,

With the system booted, use the setboot command to set the primary boot path and set AUTOBOOT ON.

setboot -p
setboot -a - if vg00 is
mirrored
setboot -b on ->Sets system to autoboot.

Hope this is what you needed.

Eric

[Prashant Gawde]

Appreciate your response.

I will try that Eric. Currently I am backing up the system using the "/opt/ignite/bin/make_recovery -r -d /dev/rmt/2m" method.

More questions:
1. How do I find the content of the tape media? Want to check if there any data exists on one before I backup. Also, how do I overwrite the media when using the above command? Or is there some way to delete/format the media before using it for backup?
2. Last time, after the IGNITE recovery, in order to have a successful restore of customer application on this system using SAM, I had created partition for CDROM folder (to extract files from the tape) (with the help of an HPUX expert) using the following commands.:
"lvcreate â L 8000 â n prashant /dev/vg00"
"newfs -F vxfs /dev/vg00/rprashant"
"rmdir /cdrom"
"mkdir /home_p/cdrom"
ln -s /home_p/cdrom cdrom"
and lot of commands before, after and in between those. It was happening very fast so, I was not able to keep notes.
Due to the recovery issues that I had, I think I have lost that folder. I tried recovery on the backed up application files and it failed due to insufficient space in the CDROM folder.
Could somebody list the procedure by which I can recreate that home_p folder and point my CDROM folder to that again?

Thank

[Mel Burslan]

first off all, if you have booted off from the tape without changing anything at the setup screens, you should have enough space if this application had run on this same server prior to server crash.

from the commands you listed, I see that you need a 8GB big volume to recover your data from tape.

first lets make sure you have enough space:

# vgdisplay vg00 | grep -e "PE Size" -e "Free PE"

you will get something similar to this:

PE Size (Mbytes) 4
Free PE 2890

when you multiply these two numbers, they should yield something more than 8000 otherwise, you will fail.

If it is okay so far, then:

# lvcreate -L 8000 -n prashant /dev/vg00
# newfs -F vxfs /dev/vg00/rprashant
# mkdir /cdrom
# mount /dev/vg00/prashant /cdrom


at this point the recovery of the tape depends on how it was created ? Was is backed up by tar ? fbackup ? or any other backup utility like Veritas NetBackup or Legato Networker or HP Data Protector (also known as OmniBack) ? You need to figure it out and use the appropriate restore commands/utility to recover from your tape into /cdrom.

to display the contents of your tape, (if it is a tar tape) use the command

tar -tvf /dev/rmt/0m
(replace 0m with your tape instance number)

it will give you the listing of the tape. If the tape is blank or unreadable, you will get an error, otherwise you will see a scroll of filenames on this tape.