Installing HP-UX 11.0 and Updating HP-UX 10.x to 11.0 HP 9000 Computers Edition 1

Chapter 6 145

HP-UX System Recovery

Overview

HP-UX provides two recovery methods as part of the standard product.

Which method you use will depend on the situation.

“Expert” Recovery

The ﬁrst method, “expert recovery” (formerly called Support Media

Recovery), allows you to recover a slightly damaged root disk or root

volume group. With this method, you boot a special recovery system from

core HP media. Once the recovery system has been booted, it allows you

to do the following:

• Put a known good kernel in place.

• Fix the LIF volume on the disk.

• Copy some essential ﬁles and commands into place.

Note that expert recovery does not require that you do any preparation

before you use it. The media used is supplied by HP; it is not customized

to your site. Of course, this also means that any customizations you have

are not reﬂected in the ﬁles you recover via expert recovery. Expert

recovery is meant to give you enough capabilities to get your system back

up again. At that point, you need to use your normal restore tool to

recover your system to the state it was in before the problem occurred.

System Recovery

The second method, “system recovery”, allows you to quickly recover

from a failed disk (root disk or disk in the root volume group). The failure

can be either a hardware failure or a catastrophic software failure.

System recovery does require some work on your part before the problem

occurs. On a regular basis, you need to run the make_recovery tool on

each of your systems. This tool creates a bootable recovery (install) tape

which is customized for your machine. The tape contains your system’s

conﬁguration information (disk layout, etc) as well as an archive of the

ﬁles on your root disk or root volume group. (You can exert some control

over which ﬁles are saved as part of the archive.)

When you have a failure, follow these steps: