Upgrading some hard drives in an L3000

[Aaron Sheard]

Hello, I have a question. I have an L3000 with 2 18gb drives. I just bought 2 72gb drives. This is my netbackup server. the 2 18s are mirrored with mirrorUX. What i was hoping to do is remove one of the 18s, put in the 72, mirror the remaining 18 to the 72, make it bootable, reboot off the new 72, then replace the original 18 with the other 72. Can this be done? What lvm or vg commands do i need to make sure the new 72 is bootable? Please help and thanks in advance! (I'm running 11i with Mirror/UX)

[Pete Randall]

Aaron,

I doubt that the pe_size and max_pe used in creating the 18GB drives will allow full use of the 72's. You would be better off to do an Ignite make_tape_recovery and restore to the new drives using that. This will allow you to configure the 72's from scratch, resize any logical volumes that need it - and you'll still be able to stick the 18's back in to fall back to if you have trouble.


Pete

[Steven E. Protter]

I believe your methodology will work.

lvlnboot -v

just make sure if the system boots during this process it won't wreck itself

strings /etc/lvmtab after the first disk swap.

do a pvdisplay -v on the disk after you give mirror/us time to rebuild

lvdisplay -v on the logical volumes and make sure all those stale PE's go away.

Follow Pete's advice and have that Ignite tape ready.

SEP

[Aaron Sheard]

Thanks Pete. can you post a link or instructions on how to use make_tape_recovery?

Then i'll be on my way. thanks again

[Patrick Wallek]

I agree wholeheartedly with Pete. Your Max PE per PV value is probably way too low to use the whole 72GB drive. Ignite/UX and make_tape_recvoery is the way to go.

[Pete Randall]

Aaron,

Here's the link to Ignite downloads and doc:

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


Pete

[Aaron Sheard]

excellent - im off to ignite!

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

#!/usr/bin/sh
/opt/ignite/bin/make_tape_recovery -Av -x inc_entire=vg00

A good Ignite script.

If you have volumes other than vg00 make the adjsutment.

SEP

[Patrick Wallek]

Fist, download and install Ignite/UX. You can get it here: http://software.hp.com/products/IUX

Create your make_tape_recovery tape with the following command:

# /opt/ignite/bin/make_tape_recovery -a /dev/rmt/?mn -I -m tar -v -x inc_entire=vg00

I'd actually create a couple of these tapes.

Then shutdown your system, install your new 72GB drives, boot up, interrupt the boot, boot from the tape.

This will bring up the installer and allow you to modify you VG parameters, LV sizes, etc.

[Helen French]

Unless you have created your vg00 originally with PE sizes and numbers that can accept a higher capacity disk, your method will fail. If you 've accepted the default system specified values for creating vg00 with 18GB disks, you cannot add the 72GBs to it.

Your best and safe bet would be to create Ignite recovery tapes (make_tape_recovery) and recreate your vg00 with 72GB disks. You can change the LVM parameters during recovery process.

# man make_tape_recovery

[Aaron Sheard]

thanks again guys! sound advice!

[Aaron Sheard]

i have one more small problem. i created the tape recovery, over to my LTO drive which went fine. halted the system, installed the new drives, brought up to the boot selection screen but i cant seem to boot from the tape devices. i have 5 lto drives connected via scsi-to-fiber bridges to 3 fiber cards in the L3000. the path to the tape drive i want is on 0/3 but will it let me? i have 5 drives and it only shows 3 in the boot selection screen which i suspect are the fiber cards. Having said that, if i cant boot directly from tape it looks like i need an Ignite/UX B.4.1 Dec 2002 or later cd to boot from. I never received that all I have is the setp 2001 11i OE cds. when i go to download the latest ignite, its just a depot file not a bootable iso image. How can i get this thing to boot and recover?

[Steven E. Protter]

Its been my experience that you can make Ignite tapes on remote drives attached to fiber networks, but they don't show up as boot devices when you do the sea command at the console.

After a long software call with HP last summer, I was told I needed those Ultrium drives hung off my LVD SCSI cards.

That was a shame, becasue it cost us $5,000 per machine to buy the drives.

I know you probably don't want to hear that, and you should verify this with HP.

SEP

[Aaron Sheard]

i think i am going to go the other route and make a net recovery archive to another system that has lots of disk space that should work fine. then all i need to do is boot off the network.

[Steven E. Protter]

Good plan.

Note that you can only boot this box off its built in LAN card, lan0, not any add in cards.

SEP

[Aaron Sheard]

oh thats too bad. it has a pci gig e card. o well i guess i have to ignite it at 100mb. thanks again all of you for your help!

[Steven E. Protter]

I hate to add, because it should have been in my last post.

You can only BOOT off the built in card.

You can do the Ignite transfer after boot off any card you want.

instl_adm -d > /tmp/ignite.text
vi /tmp/ignite.text

Put in the network settings for the 1000 BaseT card. I have no Unix access, but one of my recent Ignite posts as the details of the file.

After making changes:

instl_adm -f /tmp/ignite.text

instl_adm -d

The last command checks your settings.

To be honest, the built in NIC on the L3000 is a pretty nice 100 BaseT card and if you do the whole transfer on that, it will be pretty quick, even with big images.

But, if you want to go for the big speed, you can do it.

This should have been in the prior post and is incomplete.

0 Points please.

SEP

[Aaron Sheard]

Thanks to everyone who helped. I have successfully upgraded the harddrives and everything is back to normal, using make_net_recovery & ignite. This ignite product is nice. Works very well. Ive used it in the past for clean OS installs but not recoveries. Im impressed.