[Suns-at-Home] SunOs - Disk clone

[martin nichols]

Hi All,

Wow! Many many thanks for all the helpful suggestions.

I think I'll try the Bob Smarts process on the 'spare' machine using another 
disk in the external box. That way I can have a  dry run of the whole thing 
without touching the 'at risk' system. I take Sheldons point that the 
SUN424's are really on borrowed time so a newer bigger disk would be better.
I have some Quantum Fireball 1080S drives that are OK. I'll try one of those.

Thanks again.
Regards,
Martin.


On Monday 23 June 2008 23:21, Bob Smart wrote:
> It has been years since I've done this so I won't try to give you all
> the details but some process and pointers of the way I used to do it
> when cloning machines for a training room
>
> 1) List out partitions and sizes of existing disk Yea I write it on
> paper I found writing it down helped me think about it
>
> 2) Get a disk of sufficient size (bigger is always fine) in an external
> chassis and hook it up to the system (I believe in shutting the system
> down to connect up a SCSI disk)
>
> 3) Partition the new disk and newfs the partitions.
>
> 4) mount the partitions ( I usually had mount points /sd1a, /sd1d,
> /sd1e, /sd1f, /sd1g, /sd1h already created on my standard image)
>
> 5) For each partition cd to the partition and use
> dump 0cf - . | (cd <newpartition>; restore xf -)
>
> Do this for each partition. This command used to show up one either the
> dump or restore man page
>
> 6) If you plan on booting the new dis as an external disk (usually sd1
> or sd2) then edit the fstab file to change the partition names from sd0
> [yea I would occasionally forget this if I hadn't done it in a while]
>
> 7) Look at the installboot man page to get the syntax of the command
> right then run this command on the new disk
>
> If my memory is good that is pretty much the process. Yes it could
> probably be scripted but I never did it often enough on any given
> configuration to make it worth while.
>
> Please don't trust any of what I have said. Look through it and make
> sure you understand why you are doing each step along the way. I have
> not intentionally put any tricks or gotchas in it but it has been at
> least 3 years since I have done it on a Solaris system and much longer
> on a SunOS system. The same basic process has worked on DEC(Compaq)
> Ultrix/Tru64 systems and the basic dump piped to restore is a mainstay
> tool I've used when moving filesystems (as long as they are not on the
> same physical disk. In that case you could sometimes get done faster by
> moving it first to a new disk than back to the first one because of disk
> head movement )
>
> I had an aversion to using DD since as I remember it didn't allow as
> much flexibility in changing disk partition sizes (or sometimes layouts)
>
> Bob Smart (bsmart@xecu.net)
>
> martin nichols wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > I wonder if anyone can point me in the right direction.
> >
> > I'm trying to keep an an early 1990's IPX based PCB CAD system
> > operational. I have another complete IPX which can be canibalised for
> > hardware spares, but no copy of SunOs 4.1.3 or the CAD package that runs
> > on it. Even If I had I'm not sure that I would be able to install and
> > configure it without any manuals.
> >
> > Both IPX's have had the NVRAM hack and now have a 1/2AA lithium cell that
> > should keep the clock ticking until I'm in a box!
> >
> > My question is can I somehow copy the entire disk so that in the event of
> > the disk drive failing I can rebuild the system.
> > The drives in both the IPXs are the same - SUN424.
> > I have an Archive Viper QIC150 tape drive.
> > An Exabyte EXB-8500 tape drive.
> > A SUN CD ROM drive.
> > A non-SUN SCSI external drive box and some SCSI disks in the 1 to 2 GByte
> > size range.
> > Network cables +AUI -> 10baseT adapters.
> >
> > Any help would be much appreciated.
> > Thanks.
> >
> > Regards to all on Suns@home.
> > Martin Nichols, Surrey UK.
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