AIX - Full backup to DVDs 2

[NickHodgson]

Please can someone help with my query? I'm currently setting up a new P5 Server which has AIX 5.3 installed. The server has a DVD-Rom drive, NO tape drive.

I'd like to get it to a point where Volume Groups, Logical Volumes and Filesystems are configured, users added, Oracle installed.

I'd then like to be able to do a full backup so that I can restore back to this point in the future. The server will be used for performance testing so need to tweak settings safe in the knowledge that we can get back to a stable env.

I've had a look at forums and have an idea what I need to do, but I'm having problems.

So far, I've....
1) mkcd -L -S
2) Ftp'd this to my PC and burnt it to DVD
3) Put the DVD in the DVD-Rom drive on server
4) shutdown -Fr

I'd expected this to reboot and then go into some sort of recovery mode so that I could be certain that this step had worked, but it didn't do anything.

Can you please help to get the step above working? Also, once this has been done I assume that the rootvg is safe, so I need to backup the datavg - what do I need to do here, I've seen reference to savevg, is this correct?

Thanks
Nick

 

[NickHodgson]

Thanks to everyone for all of their help so far.

I've mananged to get a bootable CD now (i had to rename it to .iso).

I can now boot from the CD and recover, however at the end of the recovery the system reboots, but when it comes back up it goes into Diagnostic menu.

I've checked the bootlist and it is showing as hdisk1, I can also get to the shell from within diagnostics and can perform a bootlist -m normal -o and it displays hdisk1.

Can anyone think of any reason why it can't boot from hdisk1?

Thanks
Nick

 

[NickHodgson]

SERVER STILL WON'T BOOT UP

Despite being able to recover from the Mysksb DVD, the server still won't boot up - it keeps going into Diagnostics Mode.

I can get to a shell prompt from the diag menu and I can see the rootvg and logical volumes, I just can't figure out why it won't boot up.

I've tried recovering the Mksysb to both hdisk1 and then hdisk0, setting the boot list appropriately, but to no avail.

I've checked the bosinstlog file and the tail of the file is:

over mounting /.
szx1d201.istc.ibm.com
copying Cu* to disk


That's it!

Can you think of anything else that I can try before I find the nearest window to drop the P5 out of

 

[NickHodgson]

No need to throw it out of the windows now.....

This was a hardware rather than software issue. On the P5, there is a pull out led screen with 3 buttons. At the 01 position it was showing M which appears to be maintenance mode. Using the buttons it was possible to set this to N normal mode. I then rebooted and up it came.

Unfortunately I've yet to find any documentation on this, but if I do then I'll post a link. It was a colleague who works on the iSeries (AS400) that had the thought, so all thanks must go to him!

Thanks to all of you that have contributed to this thread though as the initial problems that I had were creating the boot disk and this now works perfectly.

 

[DukeSSD]

Cool Nick,
Thanks for posting the follow up, all too often we never find out what fixed the problem.
The details of the control panel can be found (I'm assured) on IBM's NIGHTMARE Info Centre.
Which just leaves the question: how did your system get set to a maintenance boot rather than a normal boot? .... ghost in the machine?

 

[NickHodgson]

Ha, well it's a good question.... in my ignorance I thought the lcd was just showing error codes, I didn't realise it was interactive, so when scrolling through all I can assume is that I hit enter when in status 1 and changed it from M to N.... doh!

The links are in the IBM info centre - as you rightly say nightmare! I'd tried finding them when I initially booted up the box as I wanted to find out about the control panel, but couldn't spot them, typically it's only after I fixed it that I found the info.

Hopefully others will find these useful -

The Control Panel :

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/eserver/v1r3s/index.jsp?topic=/iphb5/pcp.htm

The statuses :

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/eserver/v1r3s/index.jsp?topic=/iphb5/cpftable.htm

By the way, if you've encountered this topic whilst trying to find info on mkcd, or mksysb, apologies for going off on a tangent with regards to the control panel, looking back I should have maybe started a new topic.