How do I make a diskcopy. My boss will pay me big bucks for this one! 1

[bigmarc]

I brought a computer to my office from a client. It has SCO unix 3.0 on it. It also has 10 years of this guys business on it. If he loses this... he loses everything!
The problem is that his Hard disk drive is very old and is about to go. How can I copy everything on it to a different HDD? It is equipped with a tape backup. If you can help me with this one I would appreciate it so much.

 

[edfair]

How big the HD? How big the tape? How comfortable are you in opening machine? What kind of HD and controller? If SCSI with external port you may be able to add external drive.
Do you have root access? As root " man tar " for one tape command set, "man cpio" for complete filesystem, "man dd" for another filesystem method.
How do you know it is about to go? Tell me your secret. I'll share my earnings with you. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[patw]

You have Open Desktop, which is really 3.2.4.2 with a GUI desktop option.

It's a 10 year old version of SCO.

I'd strongly advise downloading a copy of Backup Edge from

http://www.microlite.com.

With it you can do a total, bit verified backup, make a RecoverEdge emergency diskete boot/root and then powerdown the system (after doing a shutdown -y -g0 -i0 while logged in as root), unhook the old drive and put in a new one, then boot from the emergency diskettes you made with Edge, and it will completely restore the OS and user data to the new drive.

Be careful to not get too big a drive - older machines are limited by the bios as to the max size supported. Check with the manufacturer before purchasing one.

 

[Megabitman]

i personally like Drive Copy... It will do a sector by sector copy to a new drive (IDE or SCSI). I think it's $29 from the local "wannabe" computer store.

 

[bigmarc]

Ok, I use Open Server 3.0 it was purchased in 1992
I do have Full root access to the system
The HDD is 684MB I am not sure how big the Tape drive is but I was able to do a full backup using lonetar
The SCSI controller does have an external port
I suspect the Disk is about to go because it is making a high pitched noise which is disturbing the entire office.
I appreciate any more help you can give.
Thanks,
Marc

 

[edfair]

With lonetar make two crash recovery disks. Make a full lonetar backup.
Pull the drive and replace it with a 1 gb or smaller scsi with ID0.
Boot from the crash recovery disk and let it do its thing.
In theory (don't you love it) lonetar will be able to recreate everything. The only possible problem is you might have to an update to a later version of lone-tar to get the crash recovery capability.
This way you haven't put the noisy hard disk at risk by doing any modifications to it.
Oh, finding the 1gb hard drive might be a small hinderance. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[JorGeVaL]

The cpio command can be used to do this task

You can make a simple image of your disk with the command

# find / -depth -mount -print | cpio -ocv -I/dev/rct0 or the name of your device.

With tar you can not do this because tar is unable to backup the /dev/ directory.

if the capacity of your tape device is less than the disk the cpio command will ask for the second and so on tapes.


also make your emergency recovery disks with the mkdev fd command.

I hope this can help

 

[bigmarc]

hey guys,
thanks for the advice, it really worked. Lonetar recreated the entire hdd! it was simple and I got paid! the only thing though, after lonetar recreated what was on the original hdd onto the new hdd, the account names and passwords arent there anymore. the root account was copied over but the additional user accounts were not. also, I saw lonetar copying their user directories and contents during the restore. however using the root account, I cannout see their directories in /u/usr. If I have to create new accounts for them, can you explain to me how to do that, (what is the command and how do I link them to a directory of their own). Please try your best to answer this.
Thanks,
Marc

 

[edfair]

Easiest is to remount the old drive and tar the /etc/passwd file to a floppy then tar it onto the new drive.
Try mkuser, it may allow you to point where the users should be.
If I sound hesitant, it's because I haven't been on a 3.0 in years.
You could also try sysadmsh, users maintenance. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.