"Transplanting" a Boot Disk

[Alzhy]

On Solaris - I can attach a bootdisk that comes from Sun's smallest server (The Netra) and plug it in to a bigger box (say a E10K) and boot from it... the gyrations include (prior to booting of the transported bootdisk) - booting from CD or miniroot and rebuilding the device trees using the devfsadm command.

What is the equivalent on HPUX? (I have not tried/read on Ignite technology)If I clone a bootdisk via dd or splitting a mirror - do I have to go through any steps to boot said disk on a different system (ie. from an N-Class to a rp8400?) for the OS to recognize whatever HW and pathing differences there may be?

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi,

It is not possible (with HP-UX) to move a boot disk direct between different hardware or (as far as I know) possible to "rebuild" the disk for a different system. You have to create a Ignite archive and install it on the other system with the option "Clone system to a different hardware".

[twang]

To clone a system on different hardware, if you use a recent Ignite-UX it is supported to clone to different HW:
1. make_tape_recovery command to build a bootable tape from the source server.
2. boot the second server using the tape.
3. interrupt the boot process in the ISL.
4. execute SEA command to find out all hardware paths.
5. type BOOT .
6. follow instructions to setup new hostname, ip address, subnet mask...

[Bill McNAMARA_1 · Accepted solution]

once there's no striking differences in the CPU types it should be okay. I've done this many times. The only thing you'll stumble on is LVM. The boot disk device file will most likely change. Boot into maintenance mode (interupt boot)
SEA
BO P?
interact with ISL y
hpux -is -lm
# mv /etc/lvmtab /etc/lvmtab.old
# ioscan -fnkC disk
# vgscan
# vgchange -a y vg00
# cat /etc/fstab
# fsck /dev/vg00/lvol{*}
# mount -a
# strings /etc/lvmtab

Later,
Bill