[rescue] Imaging Solaris 2.5 without SCSI devices

[Carl R. Friend]

    On Mon, 5 Dec 2011, Ian Finder wrote:

> Mostly what I'm worried about is DDing a mounted, running, volume.
>
> Is this something that should be attempted from single user mode or similar?
>
> Namely worried about filesystem integrity and locks.

    Doing the image from single-user mode is the second-best option,
the very best being to boot from other media (e.g. CD/DVD) and do
the image that way.  From a running system, the net result you'll
get will resemble a crash on the (newly-booted) image; you'll need
to do an fsck on the filesystems, and things that were in the process
of getting flushed to disk may be corrupt -- this is why you want
to quiesce the system as much as possible whilst you're taking
the "dd" snapshot.

    Another *very* good way to snapshot a drive is to attach it to
another system that has the proper controllers and "dd" the image
that way.  In this case, since there is no possibility of the
system being imaged being active you wind up with a pristine copy.

    Cheers!

+------------------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin)            | West Boylston       |
| Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast            | Massachusetts, USA  |
| mailto:crfriend at rcn.com                        +---------------------+
| http://users.rcn.com/crfriend/museum           | ICBM: 42:22N 71:47W |
+------------------------------------------------+---------------------+