Replace mirrored root drives with larger ones. Ignite?

[Ray Humpage]

I want to replace my mirrored 18GB internal OS drives with 72GB drives. Is the best way to do this to created an ignite tape, swap both drives at once and then restore from ignite? Will ignite handle this Ok? I am worried that I will not end up with all 72GB being usable because the ignite tape was created on a smaller drive. Will ignite take care of restoring the mirroring and making both drives bootable or will I need to take care of that manually when the restore is complete.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

Create your Ignite recovery tape and boot from it. Choose an advanced installation. Then, from the File Systems tab choose your target disk for vg00 and size your logical volumes acording to your needs. When the restorartion is complete, build a mirrored disk for vg00 just as you would have done originally.

Regards!

...JRF...

[DCE]

Ignite is definitely the way to go. It will ahndle the disk swap just fine. Just be sure to do the interactive restore, instead of the automatic restore. That way you can resize the lvols at the same time, and specify the disk you want for the primary root disk. Ignite will automatically resize the vg to full advantage of the new disk size - and you can verify that in the inteactive mode.

Ignite does not restore mirroring, so you have to mirror the new disk manually.

[Sundar_7]

Ray,

Yes, that is probably the best way to replace the small drives with larger ones. The 72 GB disks will be usable when the ignite restore completes.

But make sure you use the right options with make_tape_recovery. By default only minimal OS is included in the archive. You want to use the -A or -x inc_entire=vg00 options to include the entire vg00 in the tape. Also -I option is a good one.

Sundar.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

The downside to replacing your OS drives with larger ones is that you are going to be sorely tempted to use them for more than vg00 --- but don't do it even if all that wasted space is driving you nuts.

[Ray Humpage]

A. Clay Stephenson,

I totally agree with you and normally wouldn't use the space for anything else. Unfortunately this box is an A500 with only 2 drive slots that I inherited from another admin who left. He used vg00 to hold the the OS and the web servers apps. Hence the need for the larger disks now.

[Sheriff Andy]

We did exactly what you are suggesting;

1) Replace our 36GB mirrored drives with 72GB mirrored drives.
2) Ignite restore from tape.
3) Mirrored the file systems in vg00.

This in my opinion is the safest way since you have the backup of your removed 18GB drives as a backup if all fails.

I do recommend that you have your latest pax, tar and ignite patches. Also make sure that ignite is at its latest rev. This will give you greater success.

The ignite process is really not too difficult, if you have a test system, try it on that.