Mirroring boot disk, removing mirror copy, booting it in *another* machine and resuming mirroring

[Richard Lloyd_8]

Although there's been loads of postings about getting your HP-UX mirrored system disk to boot when the first one fails, they all seem to assume that you're just booting on the same machine, but from a different disk.

What I decided to do was to actually use the mirror disk as a "clone" to boot into another machine:

I split the logical volumes (lvol1_copy etc.), fsk'ed them, edited appropriate files so that IP/hostname were different (e.g. /etc/rc.config.d/netconf) and did various other "magic" suggested here (e.g. lvrmboot, lvlnboot etc. etc.) which did eventually allow me to remove the mirrored disk and boot on another (identical hardware) machine.

So far so good - I've got the second machine with the mirrored disk now thinking that there's 2 physical volumes and 3 logical volumes (i.e. not mirrored yet, but both disks in machine 2 present and accounted for), but the after-affects of the lvsplit still seem to be lingering. Namely, attempts to up the number of mirror copies to 1 via lvextend now results in:

lvextend: Not enough free physical extents available.
Logical volume "/dev/vg00/lvol1_copy" could not be extended.
Failure possibly caused by PVG-Strict allocation policy.

In fact, *both* the original machine and the second machine now say this (I'm now trying to activate mirroring on each machine, but without success).

No, I can't do an lvmerge before you ask of course (different disks on different machines), but I can see that "lvchange -s" might be a possible remedy. Anyone got any clues? What additional info do folks out there need to make a diagnosis - I'll post up whatever's needed.

[Steven E. Protter]

The tool for system cloning is not moving around disks. I'm sure you can make it work, but Ignite is designed to let you clone sysetms, and even customize how the clone comes out.

To make the disk move scenario remove, I would think you need to lvspit and then lvreduce the disk out of the volume group to work.

I'm still not sure you'll be able to just boot off that disk. Surely you can't without changes, because the netconf file is the same. Two machines, same ip address, won't work on the same network.

Thats' why Ignite is a better tool for the job.

SEP