creating and booting from backup partition

[drrock]

I would like to create backup root patitions on various versions of Solaris (versions 1.1 through 7). I was able to create and boot from backup root on Solaris 1.2 on a sparc20<br>setup from scratch for testing, but was unable to boot on a live production system. The bkroot is on a second disk. It appears to me that swap space needs to allocated on the same drive as the boot partition. Is there any way of creating swap space (usable by boot) on an existing disk without repartitioning? Possibly a swap file? but will it be usable when booting?

 

[AndyBo]

Do you want to use the backup root partition purely as an emergency only, get me in so I can fix the problem, kind of thing?&nbsp;&nbsp;If so, why not just boot off the original installation CD?&nbsp;&nbsp;This would let you accomplish what you want to do.<br><br>Alternatively, have a think about setting up a mirror of the root partition.&nbsp;&nbsp;That way, if the main root gets fritzed, the mirror copy should auto-magically take over and let you get in to fix the problem.<br><br>Facilities for mirroring are in, at least, Solaris 2.6, 2.7, and 8. <p> <br><a href=mailto: > </a><br><a href= > </a><br>--<br>
0 1 - Just my two bits

 

[drrock]

I`ll start with a little background. I`m admin to 21 servers(sparc 20 or equiv) in a 24/7 production environment. Some of the sparcs have been around for 7,8 years. Proprietary programs have prevented us from upgrading some of the older OS versions. I recently had to replace a disk(root of course). Unfortunately it crashed on a Sat. at 8:30 pm and was critical to production. I was able to boot from cd and restore from backup on a new disk but I didn`t get home `til after 1 am. I am hoping to put something together where I can talk a body through booting from bkroot so I can log in from home and make repairs without losing as much production time. Most of my concerns are with Solaris 1.1 and 1.2. Anything you can think of would be helpful.

 

[AndyBo]

Ah, I understand your situation a little more now...&nbsp;&nbsp;Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with Solaris 1.x, so the only thing I can think of is to set up a mirror of the root disk.&nbsp;&nbsp;That way, if the main root parition falls over, then the mirror should automatically take over. <p> <br><a href=mailto: > </a><br><a href= > </a><br>--<br>
0 1 - Just my two bits

 

[AndyBo]

During my wanders for a generic cross-platform backup script, I stumbled across a shell script that someone has created that might help you out.&nbsp;&nbsp;From the description on the web page:<br><br>&quot;This script works for Solaris machines only, but does support multiple Sun architectures.&nbsp;&nbsp;It duplicates the root disk to another disk using newfs, fsck, and dump.&nbsp;&nbsp;It then sets the EEPROM settings to automatically boot off that disk the next time the system is rebooted. &quot;<br><br>You can find this at <A HREF="

http://www.backupcentral.com/duplicate.html"

TARGET="_new">

http://www.backupcentral.com/duplicate.html</A><br><br>Hope

it helps. <p> <br><a href=mailto: > </a><br><a href= > </a><br>--<br>
0 1 - Just my two bits