Solaris DiskSuite, boot from detached disk

[carlossg]

Hi,

I am running Solaris 8 on Sun server with 2 hard drives. I have configured mirroring on the system using DiskSuite tool in order to have the same data on both disks. Now I want to perform some software upgrade and I would like to use the second disk as a backup disk. This means taking this disk out of the system, performing the upgrade on disk one and after that trying to boot from disk 2 in case that something with the upgrade fails.

I don´t know which is exactly the procedure to do this. I have tried removing submirrors (metadetach and metaclear) and state databases from disk 2 and editing vfstab file, but when trying to boot from disk 2 it doesn´t work. Is this the right procedure? Has anyone faced such a problem before?

BR
Carlos

 

[Mike042]

Hi Carlos,

Yes, broadly speaking, that is the correct procedure. When you constructed the mirror using SDS (Solstice DiskSuite) did you install the boot blocks on the 'second' disk to make it bootable? If you did, then we are going to need more information such as error messages from a failed boot (or a copy of the console output), listing of the /etc/vfstab, etc.

I hope that helps.

Mike

 

[gallows]

You might want to write the bootblock to the second disk to make it bootable. I always forget to do this)

Gallows

 

[carlossg]

I finally could solve the problem. The boot sector was already installed, I forgot to mention it on the explanation. The problem was with the /etc/system file of the second disk. There were still some references to metadatabases, so I had to comment them out and after that the disk booted fine.

BR
Carlos

 

[gjandrews35]

How do you..
"write the bootblock to the second disk to make it bootable."

 

[Annihilannic]

See the installboot man page.

Annihilannic.