restoring entire system from backup

[Daniel Gowans]

I made a full system backup using fbackup before trying to upgrade to 11i. The upgrade failed, so I did a cold install. At this point I was told that the system was a print spooler for some old plotter and had to have 10.20 on it.

The backup was made to a file (not a tape) and the file resides in the /tmp directory (I ftped it from another machine over the network after 11i installed)

How do I restore the system to its old self? I want to make sure that when I boot it again, 10.20 will be happily running the plotter's spooler like it did before I touched it. I have to use frecover because the backup file fbackup made is all I have.

I started with this:
Booted from the HP 11i CD-ROM, chose system recovery, then mounted the hard disk as /ROOT from the cd-rom root, then at the shell type:

chroot /ROOT /sbin/frecover -f /tmp/backup03112003 -r -o

It is currently churning away. It is saying a few things about stuff already existing (e.g. ./h exists but is not a directory) Is that a cause for concern?

[Ross Zubritski]

Daniel,

Do you have a current ignite backup of the box?

Regards,

RZ

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

If you have an Ignite backup.

Boot the system, restore off Ignite, then restore from fbackup tape.

If not.

Do a cold OS install, restore from fbackup tape, and then make your kernel changes to restore the system to its original state.

SEP

[Daniel Gowans]

The backup was from a 10.20 system. I tried booting from 11i CDs after installing 11i and the restoring from the backup. It caused a crash.

So I installed 10.20, booted from the 10.20 media, chose recovery, chrooted the main drive, and did an frecover.

This did the trick. I rebooted and everything works great again, just like it used to be.

Thanks for your help.

[Andrew Fong]

I tested the steps you posted back in Mar 2003. My question is how do you restore /var, /opt, etc.. because they are not mounted (just a directory on root)? You indicated that you used "frecover -f .. -r -o" to restore your 10.20 system. How can you do that? You will overflow your root disk. Am I missing something. Let me know if you would like to share. Thanks in advance.

[Bill Hassell]

fbackup (and tar, cpio, pax, dump, etc) are all file backup tools and cannot run by themselves--they need a working operating system. For restoring selected files and directories, fbackup is fine. But recovery of the boot disk is very complicated because there is no way to run frecover without first cold-installing and partitioning the system. This is what Ignite/UX does.