SUMMARY: Booting off external disk

From: Clarkson, Michael (clarkson@amgen.com)
Date: Wed Feb 05 1997 - 10:24:10 CST


Sorry for the somewhat late summary , bur things have been quite hectic
recently.
Thanks to everybody who replied.
My original question was :-

Hi,

I am trying to replicate the disk of our backup server (solaris 2.5), so
in the case of a disaster recover situation, I can simply hook up an
external disk, and boot.

I replicate the servers internal disk to an external disk and install
the bootblock. However when I then plug this into another workstation
and boot, the boot fails, as obviously the SCSI ID's have changed and
the device links aren't correct. At this point at get left at the prompt
with a read-only filesystem. Is there any way to remount this /
filesystem read-write, so that I can run drvconfig;disks;devlinks an
update the disk devices and associated links.

Thanks in advance

Michael Clarkson
Unix Systems Admin
Amgen Ltd

P.S Whats the difference between Solaris 2.5 and 2.5.1, Is there
anything to be gained from running 2.5.1 as opposed to 2.5. It was my
>understanding that 2.5.1 was only necessary fro Ultra architectures.

Thanks to all that responded,

Tim Carlson [tim@santafe.edu]
Frank Pardo [fpardo@tisny.com]
Karlheiz Pischke [kpischke@cadence.com]
R. Nemlekar [ravindra@airmail.hobl.lucent.com]
Yizhong Zhou [zhou@mathworks.com]
Caleb Warner [ewarner@slpma8.ed.ray.com]
Dan Pritts [danno@aa.fv.com]
Michael Fetzer [Michael_Fetzer@mktstrat.com]
Lin Hai [Hai.Lin@PRC.Sun.COM]
Darrin Currier [dcurrier@admin.ed.umuc.edu]
Peter Allan [peter.allan@aeat.co.uk]
Rich Kulawiec [rsk@itw.com]

Answers:-

1) To boot off an external disk boot -r diskn ( where n is the
scsid),Not quite the answer i was looking for.
2) Boot of cdrom, mount the / partition and edit vfstab.
3) try /sbin/mount -o remount,rw /dev/dsk/whatever /

This last one did the trick, i could then run drvconfig;disks;devlinks
and update all the device sym links, and edit the vfstab.

Answers to the P.s:-

I can't answer your first question sorry. However 2.5 versus 2.5.1 I can
take
a stab at. We are running in an environment with about 175 mixed
sparc5's and
dual processor sparc20s. We meet weekly with Sun Service and Sun Sales
to
review any outstanding issues. They have been telling us for about two
months
now, that we should absolutely without question be running 2.5.1. They
do not
give any specifics, however they do say there are a number of bugs that
are
fixed in 2.5.1.

Hope this helps

Caleb Warner
Raytheon Company



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