recovery tape

[dhanish]

I have a doubt. I have a make_recovery tape with me and i want to boot my hp system with that so that it should come up with required minimal filesystems mounted.my system is working fine as of now itself ..i just want to explore how make recovery tape will help me in case of crash.Plus i have downtime also with me at this tile.So i f i do that and after that if i remove the tape will the system be back to its original state and will boot from the primary path configured in ipl auto boot file with the same vg and lv configurations .Or this tecovery tape will cahnge my lif volume on the working primary bootable harddisk.Plus i also want tyo know how to boot from the tape....i guesss by hitting the esc key while the booting of sys is in progress and then it will come to pdc and then doing sea ipl and it will give me all the bootable devices and then by giving bo that path ....is it correct ..can somebody help me on that.

[Patrick Wallek]

To answer your questions:

Booting from the make_recovery tape - Your procedure is correct. When you do the sea, it should detect the tape drive, and then you choose to boot from the tape drive.

If you do boot from the make_recovery tape, be ABSOLUTELY SURE to interrupt the boot sequence when it starts booting from the tape so that it comes up in "Interactive Mode". There will be a point that it will give you 10 seconds to interrupt the boot.

If you do NOT interrupt the boot from the tape at this point, and your tape wasn't created with the '-i' option of make_recovery, then it will start reading the tape and rebuilding your system, which at this point you don't want.

Once you come up in interactive mode, you can go through the menus and see how the system would be set up if you booted from the tape. But make ABSOLUTELY SURE you do NOT do anything else. If you hit the "GO!" button on the menus, it will start rebuilding your system.

When you are finished going through the menus, EJECT THE TAPE from the drive, and reboot your system. At this point nothing about your system has changed. You haven't told it to start rebuilding your system yet, so your original VG00 and all of your other data is still there. Your primary boot drive is still there and the Boot LIF on the drive, so when you reboot the system after ejecting the tape, your system should come back up normally.

I hope I have answered your questions and haven't confused you.

[dhanish]

Thanks a lot.One more question so in case i make the tape with make_recovery -A -i option then will it give me the interactive mode automatiically.What will be the change inthe scenerio if make the tape with -i option.pls let me know

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

Patrick has covered things quite well for you. When recovering from a make_recovery tape, the process is non-interactive by default. I'd like to add the following:

In my opinion, you should be using a new version of Ignite and the 'nake_tape_recovery' in lieu of the older, less robust 'make_recovery'.

For vg00, I use:

# make_tape_recovery -x inc_entire=vg00 -I -v -a /dev/rmt/0mn

Don't confuse the '-i' option of the old 'make_recovery' with the '-i' option of 'make_tape_recovery'. The '-I' option of 'make_tape_recovery' is the *same* as the '-i' option of make_recovery. '-I' means cause the Ignite process to be interactive when booting from tape.

Get current Ignite software at:

http://www.software.hp.com/products/IUX/download.html

...JRF...

[Patrick Wallek]

The '-i' option to make_recovery or the '-I' option to make_tape_recovery will force the tape to automatically come up in Interactive mode. I ALWAYS use this when I make my make_tape_recovery tapes.

I agree with James in that you should be using the newest version of Ignite/UX.

The newest version is A.3.3.116 for HP-UX 10.20 and B.3.3.116 for HP-UX 11.x.

There is a e-mail list that you can sign up for that will notify you when a new version of Ignite/US comes out. They generally come out every 3 months.

Here is the generic link for IUX:

http://software.hp.com/products/IUX

Here is the list for the mailing lists:
http://software.hp.com/products/IUX/mlist.html

James gave you the download link in his response.