Taking and entire image of the disk

[kursad simsek]

Is it possible to take an entire cluster-to- cluster copy of the hard drive to be used for backup and hdd redundancy replication? Is it possible to have this on any system? windows, unix, hp-ux ? i mean an image file of the whole disk which when unpacked on an hdd will bring the system to the exact condition when it was taken. What i am talking about is like a norton ghost application. No such utilities for x86 systems seems to recognize the file system for hp-ux.

there is some tool in the ISL> boot like diskcopy but this does not apply to my sistem, my system works on hp-ux 10.xx (dunno the exact version) but utilities do not work at the ISL prompt.

I spent a full-day trying to mount the hp-ux disk and partitions to a linux system. but failed. linux system recognizes the disk but images are just not accessible. For example /dev/sda is the disk. The file system in the hp-ux is all hfs system, but when i try to mount /dev/sda1 it says it is not a valid block file...

All i need to do is to take a snapshot of the drive and keep it as a backup and recover it (all the operating system and software installed without reinstalling them from the scratch) like norton ghost does for linux-windows partitions.

any help is greatly appreciated.

[Patrick Wallek]

You can use Ignite/UX for your VG00.

http://www.docs.hp.com/en/IUX/

Other than that you could try using dd to make an image of a disk, but your destination must be at least as large as the source.

For HP-UX, though, I think your best bet is Ignite for VG00 then other normal backup utilities for the rest of your data.

[Devender Khatana]

Hi,


Ignite is the similar software provided by HPUx for system recovery in similar manner.

Linux will not be able to access the disk.

After taking ignite backup when it is restored to OS disk, the system comes to similar stage at which backup was taken without requiring to reload application, patches etc.

Allthough it difficult to find a latest version if ignite as you are running an absolute old version of HPux.

HTH,
Devender

[kursad simsek]

IGNITE/UX was also reccomended in another thread but it works for hp-ux 11.xx not for 10.xx i could not find a version for 10.xx. I just want it to be easy not to deal with any operation system dependend stuff, just the image of the drive, and then restore it. Not possible for hp-ux 10.xx? Can't understand why it is so hard...

[Patrick Wallek]

It is hard for HP-UX 10.X because it has not been supported for a long time now. It is a very out-of-date OS.

There used to be a version of Ignite for HP-UX 10.X, I'll see if I can find it somewhere.

[kursad simsek]

http://www.docs.hp.com/en/IUX/specs.html

Supported Operating System Versions

Ignite-UX servers run on HP-UX 11.00 and 11i v1 (B.11.11), v1.6 (B.11.22), v2 (B.11.23)

Ignite-UX servers install and manage HP-UX 11.00 and 11i v1 (B.11.11), v1.6 (B.11.22), v2 (B.11.23) clients.

It seems negative for IGNITE/UX.

[Pete Randall]

I think you can get a 10.20 Ignite here:

ftp://software.hp.com/dist/swdepot/ignite11_10.01.tar


Pete

[kursad simsek]

550 dist/swdepot/ignite11_10.01.tar: No such file or directory.

[Devender Khatana]

Hi,

All current documentation will display only currently supported operating systems. The same documentation should have been showing 10.20 some times back when that was supported. The issue is not that, Ignite works on your version of OS but it is difficult the one compatible version for it now.

Does your application CD's have this?

HTH,
Devender

[kursad simsek]

I think i will try a raw-disk image/copy to solve the problem. That seems to be the quick and safe solution to my problem...
thanx for the help

does it require to pay for the lisence to upgrade from 10.xx to 11?

[Thom Cornwell]

The mkrs command has been replaced by the Support Media, but the ability to
make a system image on tape is still here. The Offline Diagnostics include a
utility `copyutil' that allows you to create a "failsafe" image of your root
disk for the purposes of crash recovery.

Note:
copyutil is the only way to create a recovery system on 10.x.
The 9.X Series 700 utility mkrs is no longer supported.

[Devender Khatana]

Hi,

Yes, the utility you are talking about at ISL prompt is the copyutil which can be used to make images on tapes and vice-versa. If not listed at ISL prompt means that offline diagnostics is not installed on your system.

HTH,
Devender

[Alzhy]

Yes you should be able to STORE a dd image of your HP-UX disk and store it on any system that supports RAW I/O.

So you should be able to do something on your HP-UX source machine like:

dd if=/dev/cXtYdZ bs=1024k|ssh linux dd of=/largefs/hpux.img

or you may output inialluy on an HPUX filesystem, ftp the img file over to a Linux/Solaris/*nix system and dd out the image to a similar disk for later boot-up on a HP-UX machine - if all you really want is to be able to clone an HP-UX system using a different environment.

[Alzhy]

Correction, it should be:

dd if=/dev/rdsk/cXtYdZ bs=1024k | ssh linux of=/largefs/hpux.img

or

dd if=/dev/rdsk/cXtYdZ bs=1024k of=/bigfs/hpux.img

BTW, your HPUX OS partitions will be VxFS by default except /stand which is a hfs/ufs. so if you have VxFS on Linux, I think there might be a chance you should be able to mount read-only the HP-UX VxFS partitions. Am not sure if Endianness will come into play ..

[kursad simsek]

copyutil was what i was talking about that was not installed in the ISL prompt. od was not recognized, is there a way to install it?

dd can be a solution however, but how about the clusters and cylinders and all the technical and hw-dependent stuff? for example whilst i get an image of the disk can i recover it to another make disk of different size? and with dd i guess the image file would be as big as the disk is (8GB disk ends up in a 8GB image file). that seems too inefficient. I guess i may find some tool like ghost (i found out it does support raw imaging) that can accomplish this with smaller image files. will investigate the issue further. But indeed, i think it is a great drawback of hp-ux to have a completely proprietary file system. no portability and stuff. LVM seems to be nice but in fact lack of support for other systems is really a de-motivator for the system. In my head, i am thinking of ways to migrate the system to solaris or linux os. only if i can make the software run... POSIX compatiblity does not mean sw portability does it?

[Thom Cornwell]

Copyutil is available on-line in Support Tools Manager (STM).

Start the X-windows interface for STM with the xstm command.
Go to Tools-->Utility-->Run-->copyutil.

or use character cell based cstm

[kursad simsek]

My hp-ux system is not connected to internet. Is there a way to access STM from any system connected to the internet? and i have CDE installed not with many tools available.

[Devender Khatana]

Hi,

It is not required to be connected.

Online means it is available while system is up and running. In GUI mode after exporting DISPLAY try running

#stm

Also take some time to assign points to responses to your questions. Your profile shows you never did that earlier.


HTH,
Devender