Failed OS upgrade

[Fred Richardett]

We have a customer who was upgrading Tru64 from 5.1A to 5.1B and the system failed during the install of the OSFBASE module. Does anyone know of a workaround to continue or resume the install without having to go back to a 5.1A OS install or trying to recover from backup tapes? The system will boot into single user mode but they cannot execute commands from /usr/sbin (the system complains about library files).

[Johan Brusche]

You boot from the V5.1A OS installation CD, exit from the installation menu to the shell. Then run 'dn_setup -install_tape',
define tmp-root and tmp-usr domaindirectories in /etc/fdmns with links to the correct dskX partition a and g, and vrestore root and usr.

Hope you followed the installation manual's advise to have a vdump available before beginning.

Have fun,

___ Johan.

[Ivan Ferreira]

I think that your best option is to restore the system from a working backup and try the upgrade again.

If you go with workarounds, in this case, you could have an unstable system.

[Fred Richardett]

Thanks for the replies. The backup issue is one of the problems. They did a backup but it is a legato backup on that server. So I need to have that system up to access the backup. I see the system creates PreUPD and PreMRG files, if there is any type of work around by moving those files then we could bring the system up and run the legato backup to restore the system to the 5.1A environment and then begin the upgrade again.

[Ivan Ferreira]

This won't help, but as a recommendation for the future, before every upgrade/patch, try to connect or use a local attached tape device to backup the server with vdump.

We are planning to have data protector as backup solution, but, because of the problem that the agent must be running, we will still use local attached devices for OS backup.

[Fred Richardett]

Unfortunatly the procedure called for doing a vdump but instead that did the legato backup. I am also in favor of tring the btcreate as an alternative recovery method. My past experience has been with HPUX and I always used their IGNITE-UX as a recovery method.

[Johan Brusche]

Last straw to grab then......
Again boot from V5.1A Installation CD, exit to shell.
Goto the directory /ALPHA/BASE/instctrl .
In there you see a file OSFBASE520.inv, it is the inventory list of all files in the OSFBASE520 (V5.1A)subset.

Copy every file listed in the 10th column and marked as "f" in the 9th column of the list in there from the CD to their correspondig place on the partially upgraded system disk.

Hint:

grep " f " OSFBASE520.inv | awk '{ print $10 }' > OSFBASE520.files

produces the list of files.
note: chars before and after the 'f' are tabs.
The list, attached here for your convenience, contains 1669 files.

After the copy the OSFBASE subset is back again at its V5.1A state. Mind you, this also overwrites any patch that was applied to the OSFBASE520 files, but it does NOT overwrite files like rc.config, fstab, inittab and hosts.

Having fun yet ....?

___ Johan./

[Fred Richardett]

Thanks again for the response. It sounds like a viable solution, and I would have liked to follow your procedure since we have more upgrades going on, the only problem being the user continued on so now it's too late.

[Fred Richardett]

Closed