why duplicated disk with dd command failed to boot.

[Ervin Liu]

I have one L class box with four IBM DMVS18D.Disk1 have root volumn group vg00 and 9 logical volumn.I used dd command duplicate other three disk with dd command(dd if=/dev/rdsk/c2t2d0 of=/dev/rdsk/cxtxdx bs=1024k).Then,we installed these three new disks to three different L class box respectively.Only one of them successively boot up.The other two faild bootup.More strange thing is that System do not think there are IPL on them.even more,if we boot from other bootable disk and run "dsikinfo /dev/rdsk/cxtxdx" on these two disk,the disksize is zero.Does any one have ever see this before?

[Alan Riggs]

dd is not a good command for placing boot utilities on a disk. While both d and lifcp could be used for this purpose under whole disk partitions, they are not reliable for creating BDRA structures under an LVM environment. It would probably be better to use mirroring to replicate the root disk, or to use a make_recovery tape to clone the system, but you might be able to remount the disks on the original system and use mkboot to write the boot utilities (if you initially ceated the disks with the -B option to pvcreate.)

[Patrick Wallek]

It sounds as if you may have a bad disk, or 2.

Did you get any errors when you did the dd to the new disks? Try doing a dd from the disks that won't boot and use of=/dev/null. If you get any errors then you probably have a bad disk.

[Karthik_2]

Hi,
Did you install the hard disks at the same hardware address as the original root disk .Probably it would be a good idea to use make_recovery to perform this type of task .I have tried in on 4 K class boxes without any issue.Remember creating make_recovey with interactive option.

[Bruce Regittko_1 · Accepted solution]

Hi,

While I agree that dd is not the best option for cloning systems, it should work. I used to have to do this weekly to install HP-UX on 16 D220's before getting an Ignite-UX server and I never had a problem.

I would try running mediainit on the disks that didn't boot and try dd again if you must use dd.

--Bruce

[Steffi Jones_1]

try to run pvecreate -b first. that will make the disk bootable.

[Ervin Liu]

Hi Friends:
Thank you all for good suggestion.
When I did "dd",I did not saw any error message.After I finished "dd",I have ever did "Seach IPL" in boot admin mode(during bootup).I can see all these disks have IPL.These three disks were actually shipped to other city,maybe they are damaged during the shippment
I have tried the "mediainit -v /dev/rdsk/cxtxdx" on them.They gave me the "I/O error".So maybe they are really damaged.

[Michael Lampi]

With the disk drive appearing properly but diskinfo reporting a size of zero, the disk drive is definitely having troubles. Modern disk drives have a bootstrap operating system embedded in firmware that can perform basic SCSI operations. When this bootstrap operating system is running it will report a size of 0 to the host computer.

When the disk spins up it loads its "normal" operating system into RAM on the drive. This OS performs additional self tests. If the self tests fail, then the drive might still report a size of 0, or it might report something else.

With mediainit reporting problems also, particularly if this is *before* the verify pass, the disk drive is definitely hosed.

If mediainit reports problems during the verify pass, then there is the slight possibility of a SCSI bus misconfiguration, such as a bent or broken pin, bad termination, or the cables are too long.

My vote is that the drive was mishandled somewhere along the line and no longer works.

[Manish Bharadwaj]

Well dd should work but i recommend to use copyutil which comes with HPUX diag CD .