Swapping disks??

[L van Mourik]

We have a D350 with HP-UX 10.20 and a D370 with HP-UX 11.0.

Now we want to move everything on all of the disks (Including OS) from the D350 to the D370 and from the D370 to D350.

Can this be done by just exchanging all the disks from one system to the other and will this work??

If not, what is the fastest way of exchanging disk content from one system to the other.

[Stefan Farrelly]

If both your D's have little Jamaicas in them (which can take 5 disks) then you can do a disk swap. You will need a setup similar to the following;

1. The OS on only 1 disk and data on say the other 4 disks (on say the 10.20 server)
2. 4 free slots for these 4 disks on the 11.0 server you wish to move them to.
3. unmount and vgexport the volumegroup(s) on the 4 data disks on the 10.20 server
4. eject these 4 disks, move them to 4 free slots on the 11.0 server
(you will get a few SCSI resets/errors on the 10.20 server when you eject the disks but nothing to worry about)
5. do an ioscan -fnCdisk on the 11.0 server and the disks will be visible.
6. vgimport the volume group(s) you know are on these disks.
7. create the same mount-points and activate the vg's and remount them.

Done.

[Patrick Wessel · Accepted solution]

Both system (D350 & D370) have the same address schema. From that point of view it's no problem to swap the discs. But, do you use the same interfaces in both systems? If not you may need to install special drivers.
If the configuration in both boxes is the same just swap the disk

[Tim Malnati]

You should be able to do a simple disk swap (machine to machine) to accomplish this. Where your bringing the OS with it, vgexport and vgimport will not be necessary. Make sure the disks are located in the same positions in both boxes. There is a better than even chance that no one has ever modified the scsi addresses. If everything is equal, the new box will boot like nothing changed at all. The usual precautions still apply though. Make sure that you have a full backup of everything in case something goes wrong.