Summary: Moving a system disk from one SSA to another.

From: Steven Sakata (sakats@buzzeo.com)
Date: Wed May 06 1998 - 15:18:33 CDT


It's been over a month that I asked the initial question, but I had to do a lot
of testing to come up with a consistent solution.

Thanks to:

Prabhakaran Santho
Art Freeman
Richard Skelton
Serguei I.Revtov
David Thorburn-Gun
Sean Ward
Bismark Espinoza
Mark Parry

for their input to the following question:

On Thu, 2 Apr 1998, Steven Sakata wrote:

> I have two E6000's each with a SPARCstorage Array. I tried moving the system
> disk from to the other, and the system wasn't able to boot up all the way.
> First, it complained with:
>
> /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s1: No such device or address
>
> Then when it tries to do an fsck on /, it says it can't access
> /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0.
>
> I log in as root to get to the single-user prompt. However, when I run
> the "format" command, it cannot find any disks.
>
> Does anyone know if this is just the way it's supposed to be, or if there's
> another step that needs to be done to make it bootable on another E6000?

When moving a system disk from a SPARCstorage array (SSA) to another
SSA on another system, a few things become incorrect:

- The /etc/path_to_inst file
- The /devices/* files for the SSA's disks
- The /dev/dsk/* links to the /devices/* files
- The /dev/rdsk/* links to the /devices/* files

This is because SSA disks have addresses that are unique to the SSA (i.e.
the address includes the unique 4-character alphanumeric SSA identifier).
Therefore, the system disk becomes unbootable, because it has the wrong
addresses to the system disk.

To fix it, all the above files need to be corrected. The steps I found
reliable were the following:

- Boot off the installation CD to single-user.
- Mount the system disk to /mnt (e.g. "mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /mnt").
- Remove /etc/path_to_inst (or move it if you don't want to remove it).
- Remove the /dev/* files (or move them somewhere else).
- Copy the /dev files from the CD by executing the following:

     cd /tmp/dev; tar cf - . | (cd /mnt/dev; tar xpBf - .)

- Remove the /devices/* files (or move them somewhere else).
- Copy the /devices files from the CD by executing the following:

     cd /tmp/devices; tar cf - . | (cd /mnt/devices; tar xpBf - .)

- Make sure all the updates are written to disk by executing "sync".
- Halt the sytem.
- At the OK prompt, type "boot -ar". Accept all the defaults and when asked
  whether to create /etc/path_to_inst, reply with "y".



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