[SunRescue] Moving system disk between machines

Wed May 3 22:10:47 CDT 2000

Yes and no. If you are adding/removing external scsi devices on a running 
system - such as a cdrom drive , or a new tape drive, or what-have-you - 
you don't have to reboot. You can simply run the triad of

drvconfig && devlinks && disks

or for tape devices,

drvconfig && devlinks && tapes

that'll configure the /etc/path_to_inst file, create the appropriate device 
entries and links, and you should be able to rock and roll without a 
reboot. If you've added or changed the configuration info for a driver, 
such as the sd disk drive or st tape driver, you may need to force a 
refresh on the loadable kernel module by unloading the active instance -

   root % modinfo | grep scsi

    20 1017f2bc   7af2   -   1  scsi (SCSI Bus Utility Routines)
    71 1023bafc  12b28  32   1  sd (SCSI Disk Driver 1.299)
    75 1024c67c   cc65  50   1  glm (GLM SCSI HBA Driver 1.129.)
    95 102a961c  110a6  33   1  st (SCSI tape Driver 1.191)

in this case, if I was trying a new tape driver, I'd run

   root % modunload -i 95

The module will then be reload with the new configuration/device info after 
the device is first accessed.

Now, all that granted, when you're talking about moving a boot disk from 
one architecture system to another, it's a whole nuther ball of wax. boot 
-r will not necessarily do the right thing, particularly with the crucial 
/etc/path_to_inst file, which may have entirely incorrect instance entries 
for the new hardware. What may work is to rename /etc/path_to_inst to, say, 
/etc/Xpath_to_inst (or /etc/path_to_inst.old, whatever you like really), 
then do a boot -ra. The 'a' flag forces the system to ask you what to do 
each during each step of the boot process. In this case, you'd accept the 
default for everything, and be sure that when it asks you if you want to 
rebuild the /etc/path_to_inst file, that you answer 'y'. That'll likely do 
the trick.

Sorry for the verbosity!

At 06:39 PM 5/3/00, you wrote:
>Anytime you change (add/remove) hardware from a system it's necessary to
>run boot -r (or if you want to use reboot, read the man page) so that the
>system can rebuild the correct devices.
>
> >
> > It may be worth being really brave,  by installing the disk
> > booting 7 off of CD and telling it to do an upgrade but
> > preserving filesystems....
> >
> > --Paul
> >
> > On Wed, May 03, 2000 at 04:52:47PM +0100, Chris Powell wrote:
> > >
> > > All,
> > >
> > > I have a Solaris 7 system disk in a SPARCstation IPC which I want
> > > to move to a SPARCstation 10 (hey, I might get usable performance
> > > now!). I want to do this without re-installing Solaris.
> > >
> > > I initially thought this would be simple as the SunOS 5.7 kernel is
> > > generic between kernel architectures (sun4c, sun4m etc.). Not so as
> > > the boot program in /platform is only present for the kernel
> > > architecture of the machine it installed was originally on (i.e.
> > > my disc has sun4c present for the IPC, but lacks sun4m for the
> > > SS10). Easily solved, boot from CD and copy the /platform/sun4m
> > > stuff from CD to the system disk. Then I realised all the /devices
> > > entries are wrong! I'm getting errors about keyboard not present
> > > when booting now - I guess I need to boot from CD again and run
> > > drvconfig using the -r rootdir option.
> > >
> > > Is there a simple step-by-step way to move systems discs between
> > > architectures, or even machines? I guess if I move the system disc
> > > to a different sun4m machine (e.g. a SS5) all the device entries
> > > will be wrong again - iommu at obio 0xe0000000 on the SS10,
> > > at obio 0x10000000 on the SS5.
> > >
> > > It actually seems more difficult to do this with SunOS 5.x than it
> > > was with SunOS 4.x.
> > >
> > > Thanks for any help.
> > >
> > >
> > > Chris.
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Rescue maillist  -  Rescue at sunhelp.org
> > > http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
> > _______________________________________________
> > Rescue maillist  -  Rescue at sunhelp.org
> > http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
> >
>
>_______________________________________________
>Rescue maillist  -  Rescue at sunhelp.org
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Paul Theodoropoulos | paul at atgi.net | Senior Unix Systems Administrator
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