Rebuilding root drive (HP-UX 11.0, J5600)?

[Bill Ferguson]

Is it possible to rebuild (reinstall) the root the following way and under the following circumstances?

My root drive has died. It will not boot at all.
I can't find a backup tape to boot from.
I do have an extra drive to pop into the machine.
I have a copy of a print_manifest output, so I know the disk stuctures, mount points, etc.

I'm thinking that maybe I can swap the root drive with another disk, and reinstall HP-UX from scratch, then re-create the LVM configuration and mount points.

Since all my real data (database stuff) is on the mounted LVM disks, should this work?

Or, should I attempt to swap my old root disk with one of the other mounted disks, then fsck the old root disk and see if I can recover any "useful" information form it, and so, what would it be? The old root drive had /, /stand, /home, /opt, /usr, and /var.

I'm thinking that if I can at least take a new drive and rebuild the intial filesystem, and then re-create the mount points and get those drives mounted, then I can at least revert back to the last fbackup tape.

Any comments or suggestions?

[Pete Randall · Accepted solution]

Bill,

Assuming all your other data was in separate Volume Groups, your approach of re-building the root disk is perfect. After it's rebuilt, simply run vgimport to reconnect the other vg's:

mkdir /dev/vg01
mknod /dev/vg01/group c 64 0x010000
vgimport -s /dev/vg01


Pete

[Bill Ferguson]

Thanks Pete,

Off to the server room I go. Hopefully I'll still have some hair left on my head when I return...

:^)