Recently our Server Room got burnt and we lost everything including a sunfire V880 server. I had a backup and restored it on our 2nd server. I mistakenly restored the etc folder from the burnt server too. After rebooting the 2nd server I can't get the root directory and other volumes mounting. I have a backup of the etc folder of the second server on tape but also I can't start the tape drive to restore the backed up etc folder of the second server.
What should I do to get the tape drive to work to restore the backed up etc folder? We run Solaris 9.
Rahman
You can't expect it to boot with a trashed /etc. You'll have to boot a recovery environment of some sort, maybe a Solaris installer disk, and work from there, running utilities from a prompt.
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What about the one I have on tape? How can I get my tape drive to work? Thanks for your response.
That's what I mean; you'd boot to a root prompt from some sort of recovery disk, and operate the tape from there. I don't think many machines support booting from tape these days.
What I mean is how can I use my tar command on the tape since when I type
[i]tar xvf /dev/rmt/0n
It tells me that device not found.
Rahman
The general suggestion seems to be deleting the device file then 'drvconfig ; tapes' but all the instructions I can find are for how to use tapes on a booted system, not a livecd...
perhaps you should boot recovery cd and restore etc on tape from there. you could also do it in some other, working, system.
already suggested this, tape doesn't work there.
This is a good idea.
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Thanks for your replies so far. Are u saying that after booting with the cd-rom I should be able to copy my etc files from the tape using tar xvf /dev/rmt/0n?
Counting on your usual patience.
Rahman
hm, well that would probably depend on cdrom.. I never tried it, but Corona says it won't work.
kind of strange that systemrescuecd doesn't enable using tape backup for restore.
btw, what filesystem is it, ufs?
if you don't have a third, working, server, here is another option. its a bit time consuming; you could emulate solaris9 for sparc on a ordinary PC with qemu.
so if you make dd image of server2 hard drive and tape backups, in theory you could restore /etc in qemu, then write back the image to real hard disk.
Corona what utilities were u talking about?
With this command
mount /dev/dsk/0t0d0s0 /mnt
will I be able restore from my tape?
In fact, am able to get the # prompt except that some of the disks can't be mounted. I also noticed that I can't even get the ok prompt.
When I start the server it always takes me to the # prompt.
Please help me.
Thanks
Depends if that's your disk or not. Also depends if that's the right partition of the right disk or not.
How you restore from tape depends on how you made the backup in the first place. You'd know that better than I.