Ignite-UX Administration Guide for HP-UX 11i (B3921-90080, November 2013)

Tape Recovery for Itanium-Based Systems
To boot from tape on an Itanium-based system you must first create a tape boot option on the EFI
Boot Manager menu. Verify that your Itanium-based system has firmware support for tape boot. If
there is firmware that supports tape boot available for your system, you may first need to upgrade
your firmware to make this functionality available. A set of tables showing minimum firmware
revisions and SCSI HBAs that support tape boot is available in the Ignite-UX Installation Booting
white paper available at
http://www.hp.com/go/ignite-ux-docs.
The first version of Ignite-UX to support native tape boot for Itanium-based systems is C.6.8. Recovery
tapes created before that version of Ignite-UX can only be used with two-step recovery. See “Tape
Recovery With No Tape Boot Support — Two-Step Media Recovery” (page 215) for more information
on two-step recovery.
The screens shown in this example are from an HP Integrity rx1620 system. Other systems may
vary in method and screen format. For information on how to configure boot devices for your
system, consult your system’s hardware documentation.
IMPORTANT: Configuring an EFI menu option for tape boot requires downtime since it can only
be done from the EFI Boot Manager. If you are going to use tape recovery on your Itanium-based
system, consider adding the tape boot option at your next planned maintenance window.
TIP: An ideal time to test tape recovery on your unique combination of system, tape drive, and
HBA, is after you have configured an EFI Boot Manager menu option for tape boot. You do not
need to recover the system. If you create a recovery tape with the -I option, you will enter an
interactive recovery. When you get to the interactive screens, reset the system instead of performing
a recovery.
Determining the Tape Drive’s EFI Path
When adding a tape boot option to the firmware, you must identify the tape drive you will use for
booting. The EFI menus will display device paths to choose from. Before beginning the tape boot
configuration process at the EFI level, you must determine the device path to your tape drive so
you can select the correct one to use for booting.
The ioscan -e command does not report EFI device paths for tape drives. Alternative methods
must be used to determine the correct path.
The EFI device path for our example is Acpi(HWP0002,100)/Pci(1|1)/Scsi(Pun4,Lun0)
One way to identify the tape drive’s path is to use the reconnect -r EFI command to get its
SCSI Physical and Logical unit numbers (Pun and Lun). The Pun and Lun numbers can be mapped
to the last part of the EFI device path. Below is the output of reconnect -r for our example.
Figure 98 Output From reconnect -r
Finding the Ultrium tape drive’s Pun and Lun numbers in this example is simple because not many
devices are listed.
If your system is partitionable, EFI will not automatically enumerate all connected devices. (This
allows for a speedier boot.) For this reason the tape drive you want to use may not be listed. If
System Recovery 201