I have an old IBM Power 5 9111-520 that has data on it but the system is failing. I need to move it to a more reliable server. The current system has two drives and no raid. I would like to setup my "newer" system with raid and two partitions then clone my setup over. What is the best way to do this?
Both systems are identical. I tried to backup the system to a tape drive but it states the system is too large for system image creation on tape drive to try DVD. So I tried to burn a dvd with the backup wizard. No Joy. It creates the system image but fails on the burning.
Is any data stored on raw logical volumes? e.g. passed to a database etc.
What tape drive do you have, and what capacity media?
What type of DVD drive do you have?
Do you have the correct DVD media?
Where does the backup fail? Can you show us the messages?
If you are using mysysb, do you exclude anything from the backup?
What general backups do you have in place for your business application/data?
Sorry it's a long list. Much of this could be illustrated with output from these commands:-
lsvg
lspv
lsvg -l rootvg # .... and for any other volume groups you have
lspv -l hdisk0 # .... and for any other physical volumes you have
df -k
lsattr -El /dev/rmt0 # or appropriate tape drive device
lsattr -El /dev/cd0 # or appropriate DVD drive device
Please wrap any output in CODE tags to make it easy to read and to preserve multiple spaces for the fixed width columns.
a) AIX 5.2 does not virtualize the same way AIX 5.3 can (no virtual ethernet, no microparititions). The product you needed for that is vWPAR 5.2 - and, as the AIX 5.3 version is rumored to be withdrawn from marketing soon - I am going to guess the vWPAR 5.2 version is already withdrawn.
b) make an mksysb image asap to a file, do not worry about it being bootable or not. Just make sure you have the image.
More to come - my ride has arrived.
So, a day later... continuing as promised.
c) to test your DVD making process - years ago (AIX 5.3 ML05 days) I wrote a short article on how to create a bootable DVD/CD (CD will work in this case) - so that you could then read and install an mksysb file from a second DVD. This was a problem I was having when moving things from some old P43-140 systems to a POWER4. If I recall correctly, the process describes (see http://www.rootvg.net/content/view/134/88/\) how a previously captured "mksysb" file can be used as input to the mkDVD process. The mksysb image created was the minimum needed to create a bootable disk.
Largely I gave up on mkDVD as a workable backup method (running the command "live" means you need to have 3X space - the actual system, the temp mksysb file it makes, and then the iso9660 file(s) it creates. One thing I learned to not do is let mkDVD write directly to the DVD (although that is probably not what you have - my POWER4 had a DVD/RAM device, soI could also use the -U option (write as UDF format to the RAM-DVD (special kind of RW-DVD media). (basically, it was so horrendously slow I always wrote to files, transferred them to a PC and burned the DVD on my PC).
So, hoping your system is still alive enough for you to make an mksysb image - I also highly recommend backing up as many non-OS related files (i.e., your real data) in a tar file - so it is easily readable on various platforms.
If you have access to any AIX 5.3 media - this should accept most applications supported on AIX 5.2 - then you could try the process of migrating your applicaitons to AIX 5.3 - and then run that on vWPAR for AIX 5.3.