SUMMARY: Boot disk magic

From: Richard Westlake <r.westlake_at_mail.cryst.bbk.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2000 09:35:55 +0100

Sorry this summary is a bit late.
For some reason our email system did not send it off site the first time.

========================================================
I received may reply to my question as to how to
make a disk bootable, including a link to the
archives.
http://www.ornl.gov/its/archives/mailing-lists/tru64-unix-managers/1998/09/msg00539.html

The problem was that my backup disk lacked a
correct boot block.

The following commands were
suggested to write a boot block to my backup disk
which already contained the / and /usr file systems.

disklabel -r rz8 > rz8.label
disklabel -Rr -t advfs rz8 rz8.label rzxx

It should be possible to do this with one command

disklabel -wr -t advfs rz8 rzxx

However some versions of the OS (DU 4.0D) would write UFS bootstrap code.
But if the label information is read from file it works

disklabel -wr -t advfs rz8 rzxx
disklabel -r rz8 > rz8.label
disklabel -Rr -t advfs rz8 rz8.label rzxx

Because of worries about losing the contents of the backup
disk when the boot block was written I created a new boot
disk and copied the data to it.

The new disk supplied by COMPAQ is rz40 the backup disk
is rz8

disklabel -r rz8 > rz8.label
disklabel -Rr -t advfs rz40 rz8.label rzxx

I then used vdump and vrestore to copy the root and usr file
systems from the backup disk to the new disk.

The result was a working system disk and the system and
my users are now happy.

Now that I had a working system disk I decided to test
where it was possible to write to boot block to a disk without
Loosing the data already stored on the disk.

The following commands successfully wrote the boot block
on my backup disk with out damaging the data.

disklabel -r rz8 > rz8.label
disklabel -Rr -t advfs rz8 rz8.label rzxx

Many thanks to everyone who replied to my question

 Sean O'Connell
 John P Speno
 David J. DeWolfe
 Russ_Fish
 Philip.Ordinario
 "Spitzberg, Bobbi (CIT)"
 Tom Brand
 Rene-Pierre Bonvin
 Joe Ryals
 Carlos Martinez
 "Davis, Alan"
 alan_at_nabeth.cxo.dec.com
 Nikola Milutinovic
 + others

Original question
=================


>
> Does anyone what the magic is to make an adfvs disk
> bootable?
>
> The system disk in one of our DS20's died. We have a disk
> with copies of the original root and /usr partitions (or file
> sets) but the system does not want to boot from it. :-(
> The system is complaining about the lack of osf_boot


Richard Westlake

Crystallography Dept. , Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX
Tel: 020-7631-6859
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               Truth endures but spelling changes -- Anon.
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Received on Wed Jul 26 2000 - 08:37:36 NZST

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