HP-UX Virtual Partitions Administrator's Guide (includes A.03.05 and A.04.05)

Archiving and Recovering a Virtual Partition
Archiving the Virtual Partition(s)
This section describes how to create the recovery tape.
NOTE:
• To recover a single virtual partition from a tape, all active virtual partitions must be
shutdown.
The exception to this is using a dual-media boot. For information on using a dual-media
boot, see “Using make_tape_recovery and Dual-media Boot” (page 281).
• The make_tape_recovery command is not a backup utility. The virtual partition should
be backed up separately. A well thought out backup strategy should be part of every recovery
plan. Your normal backups may be required to recover the virtual partition. Test your
recovery plan to make sure it works properly
1. The virtual partition must have a tape drive attached, as it will be used in step 4 to boot the
tape. The tape drive must be available to the nPartition at boot time.
# make_tape_recovery -A -a /dev/rmt/1mn
The following is archived to tape when make_tape_recovery is run:
a. The data necessary to recover the virtual partition on a “cold” system (nothing running
on it, including vPars). This includes the system filesystems (root, /stand, etc.)
b. The files required by vPars: the vPars Monitor (the default is /stand/vpmon) and the
vPars database (the default is /stand/vpdb).
2. You must document the following information about the system (not the virtual partition)
and must be available in hard copy or electronically in an accessible location not on the
system itself.
a. The primary and alternate boot paths. You must get this information from the boot
console handler (BCH). You cannot retrieve this information via the setboot command
from a virtual partition.
b. The contents of the AUTO file in the boot LIF. An example is lifcp
/dev/rdsk/<dev>:AUTO - where /dev/rdsk/<dev> is the boot device for the
system, the primary boot path in part (a). Note: If you attempt this within a virtual
partition you must do it from the virtual partition that has access to the device, as only
one virtual partition will be able to see it.
Recovering the Virtual Partition(s)
3. Shutdown all virtual partitions and reset the nPartition.
4. Boot the make_tape_recovery tape created in step 1 in the nPartition. Note that nothing
is running in the nPartition. You are booting without vPars at this point.
5. Once the recovery tape has completed recovering the system, you will still be running
without vPars. To re-enable vPars perform the following steps:
a. Correct the primary and alternate boot paths if necessary by using setboot. This works
at this step because vPars is not active.
b. Correct the autoboot setting if necessary (mkboot -a “string”
/dev/rdsk/<dev>:AUTO where /dev/rdsk/<dev> is the boot device for the system
and “string” is the contents of the AUTO file from step 2b above. The device file name
may be different from that found in step (2)(a).
6. Reboot the nPartition. The vPars Monitor will start automatically if step 5 completed correctly.
Any virtual partition that has been defined to autoboot will boot at this stage. You may have
to manually start any virtual partitions not configured to autoboot. The vPars Monitor will
278 Crash Processing and Recovery