Essential System Recovery: Creating a Bootable Recovery Tape

	NOTE: The copyutil tool is only supported as a diagnostic tool for HP-UX 10.x or later, and should not be used for recovery. Instead, you should use one of the tools described in this chapter. Note also that make_recovery (and booting from tape) is not yet supported on current HP V- class systems.

The make_recovery command creates a system- recovery tape. This tape can be used to boot and recover a system which has become unbootable due to corruption of the root disk or volume group. By providing a "customized" installation medium, the tool makes use of the installation technology provided by Ignite-UX.

A system can be booted and installed from the tape without user intervention for configuration, customization, software selection, hostname, or IP address.

The system-recovery tape consists of a boot image, followed by an archive of system files that comprise a minimum core OS. The minimum core OS consists of /stand, /sbin, /dev, /etc, and subsets of /usr, /opt and /var that are required during the install process. The devices or volume groups that correspond to the file systems/directories /, /dev, /etc, /sbin, /stand, and /usr are considered core devices or volume groups. These devices or volume groups are recreated during the recovery process. All non-OS data on them would be removed and restored during the recovery process, if they were specifically appended to the recovery tape. If /usr, /opt or /var are mounted elsewhere, they would not be re-installed during the recovery process, and are fully preserved.

The make_recovery command provides a mechanism for you to specify your own non-system files in the archive by using the /var/adm/makrec.append file. These specifications are limited to files or directories that belong to file systems in the core devices or volume groups.

The make_recovery command also provides a mechanism for you to exclude selected files from the archive via the -p and -r options. For backing-up and recovering non-core file systems which are not on the core device or volume groups, you would use normal backup utilities.

	NOTE: The system recovery tape is only as good as the last time it was created. The tape should be recreated if new software, hardware, or patches have been added. You can use the check_recovery to determine whether the system has changed enough that the tape needs to be recreated.

Logging

Progress and errors are logged to the file /var/opt/ignite/logs/mkrec.log*.

Default Recovery of Entire Root Disk

To create a System Recovery tape, which includes the entire root volume group and a non-core volume group, if /usr is included in the non-root volume group, do the following (the tape would be generated at the default device /dev/rmt/0m):

Creating a Minimal OS Recovery System

To create only a root-volume group archive/system, including only the core files/directories from other volume groups, you can use the default command, as follows:

Restoring a System

To restore the root disk or volume group, do the following:

For More Examples and Information

See the man page make_recovery(1M) for details on using the options, and the syntax for doing so.

Creating a Bootable Install Tape

The make_medialif command, also delivered with Ignite-UX, creates a bootable LIF image which can be copied to either a DDS tape or a writable CD to create an Ignite-UX install medium.

Examples

Some typical examples of the use of make_medialif are the following:

• To create a boot LIF image using the config file /home/root/myconfig and then place it in /home/root/uxinstlf, enter the following:

  # make_medialif -f /home/root/myconfig -l /home/root/uxinstlf

• To create a bootable DDS medium that will allow the installation of a configuration defined on an Ignite-UX server, for example, the "HP-UX B.10.20 Default" configuration, and using the same tape drive as before, do the following:

  # make_medialif -c "HP-UX B.10.20 Default" -l \/home/root/uxinstlf

  # mt -t /dev/rmt/c0t3d0DDS1n rew

  # dd if=/home/root/uxinstlf of=/dev/rmt/c0t3d0DDS1n obs=2k

  # mt -t /dev/rmt/c0t3d0DDS1n rew

  Note that the install will proceed according to how the variables run_ui and control_from_server are set in the INSTALLFS and in the config files.

Creating a fully self-contained tape that does not require the use of an Ignite-UX server involves copying a depot or system archive to the tape and specifying a config file representing the archive or depot.

Recovery Procedure

To recover a failed system disk or volume group, you would do the following:

1. Mount the System Recovery tape on the tape drive

2. Boot the system

3. Interrupt the boot sequence to redirect it to the tape drive

4. Indicate no interaction with ISL.

5. Allow the system to complete the process.

6. 	NOTE: If the recovery process encounters a configuration change/error, it goes into the interactive mode, and displays the Ignite-UX welcome screen with the following options: [ Install HP-UX ] [ Run a Recovery Shell ] [ Advanced Options ] [Reboot] [Help] At this point, select the Install HP-UX option. (You are installing from the customized media). Select Advanced Installation (recommended for disk and filesystem management) Change your configurations and continue. Selecting disks should be done with care, as any existing data on the disks will then be lost.

The system recovery tape can also be used to duplicate software on your system onto another system, with some manual configurations after the software has been installed.

For More Examples and Information

See the man page make_medialif(1M) for details on using the options, and the syntax for doing so.