Hicom 300H 6.6 Recovering from a hard drive failure

[lalo1028]

I have aquired an Old Siemens Hicom 300H release 6.6 model 80ep. The hard drive is toast and the backups are suspect. The SWU has remained up and functioning as expected. When I do a recovery on the drive it appears to complete succesfully but when it comes to the option of reloading the SWU I chose not to because of not knowing whether the back up is good or the recovery is good. The problem the system has is that I have to restart the system to access the com port or the IP address to do config. When using LC WINN if I do an extended list the system restarts and a message appears that says it restarted because of cnfg call. I also cannot do a backup as the A1 will restart. The system will do an EXE-UPDAT:BP,ALL;
with no errors. I need assistance please

 

[donb01]

I used to do my hard drive recoveries in another system and then put the drive back in the original system while it was still running, and activate the drive. With a model 80 you can shut down the ADM functions without messing up the CC (telephony) functions. Then you do exe-updat:bp,all; TWICE and exe-updat:a1,all; TWICE and that should save all of the running configuration on the switch onto the new hard drive. You already put your Unix and stuff on the drive during the recovery procedure so the only thing left to do is save the data from the memory to the drive. When you do a backup on the system it really doesn't back up everything - it only backs up the config data. Onthe thing that is important when building a recovery drive is to look at what patch package the running system is on (i.e V6/6 PPF) and build your new drive with the same version so there are no database format issues.

The other thing I can't remember the exact command syntax for, but LC-Win would get flaky and you could do something in RMX like exe-xapc:deact.LCT; to deactivate LC-Win and exe-xapc:act.LCT; to activate it again, and that's kind of like rebooting LC-Win. Please don't do that without verifying the syntax!!

Hope that helps.

Don Bruechert, Voice Comm Analyst II
CareTech Solutions @ Holy Family Memorial
Manitowoc, WI, USA

 

[lalo1028]

During the recovery it asks for the most current backup during the isyaps tape routine. What exactly is loaded off of the most current backup?

 

[donb01]

As far as I ever understood it, all the data from all the AMOs, your system-ID, and the RMX data. 9006.6 was the most stable one. Prior to that the EMML database and the RMX database were 2 separate things, and if you did stuff like use EMML and RMX or LC-Win you could actually get the 2 databases out of sync, and then you would have to run a script you would have to resynchronize the databases. Even to this day in the 4000 if you split your time between RMX and Assistant you can get the databases out of sync and you have to do a procedure called "Upload" to get everything on the same page again. Honestly I'm not sure what the backup part does - whether it actually puts the databases with whatever data is in them on the disk, or if blank ones get put on when you do the initialize. Even so, if you have a good backup that's a couple of years old go ahead and use it, and when you are finished do both of the updats twice to put the data currently in the switch onto the hard drive. The system will not load the data off the hard drive unless it boots or does a reload. As soon as the process gets done and you get the prompt back immediately do the updats. There are never any guarantees, but the system normally runs from the memory, and as long as you have a valid disk and you write the memory off to the disk you should be good. Just be sure to do each one twice - there is a normal area on the HD and a "secondary" area and you want the data to be copied to both areas. The first updat copies the system data to the primary area, and the second updat copies the primary area to the secondary and then copies the same data to the primary again. In the event one partition on the HD gets corrupted it is still possible to load from the other one as long as the whole drive isn't toast... I'm not an expert on recovery, and it's probably been 8 years since I had to do one, but I did a few of them. Also if you can get a DAT drive cleaning cassette run that through the drive at least 6 or 7 times in a row (the first time). Those drives had a reputation for being hard to clean.


Don Bruechert, Voice Comm Analyst II
CareTech Solutions @ Holy Family Memorial
Manitowoc, WI, USA