Installation on SCO Openserver 5.0.5

Hello all,
First off- great forum! I have learned a lot just by reading some of the questions and answers. Good to see there are good people out there still willing to help!

Here is my dilemma- I have a fairly new server running an Activant product on it, which runs SCO openserver 5.0.5 as its O/S. This software hasn't been used in 2 years as we changed to a different company. I would like to put this software back on the previous server, that way I can re-commission this new server for in house data backups. I have already re-installed the software on the old from the backup tapes (they run nightly) but I am getting a few errors.

1- sh-fork failed - too many processes
2- login.sco error - failed to initialize policy manager daemon

Not sure if they are linked or not? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks

Firstly, let me try to understand what you have done.

Was the old server booting 5.0.5 before you started? Or are you restoring an old native backup onto it by booting from removable media (floppy, tape, whatever)? Obviously, if you are restoring a backup created on this old machine then it should work if you do it correctly (disaster recovery routine).

If you have restored a backup from the new machine onto the old machine then some drivers may be different which will prevent it running from a straight restore.

What format (cpio, tar, whatever) are the old machine's backups in?
What format are the new machine's backups in?

Please elaborate on the steps already taken.

Check the date in the CMOS. If it is prior to the date of the original install the system will not boot properly.

The old server originally had this software on it, then it was migrated to the new server. This server has since sat for 2 years, but it did boot 5.0.5 before so I just assumed it would boot it again. The backup the Activant product uses is a 2 tape system for its backup procedure - 1 for data, and 1 for programs (which I assume is the O/S). The software has a CD which you can boot from to re-install, which is what I did. I booted from the CD, and picked 'disaster recovery' from the list which I assume would re-install 5.0.5 and the data. I am not sure what format the backups are in.

JGT- I did replace the CMOS battery when I got this server out of storage, and the date is correct.

I am almost thinking I need to get a copy of 5.0.5 and install it with the trial codes and see if I can get everything working first, and then try to boot from the CD and re-install the Activant product. Would that be a good start?

if this is the original machine, why was it necessary to boot from a cd. i would have thought that only the data needed to be restored.
what is the original hardware config?

The original machine had an older version of the Activant software on it so I thought I would have to update the software to the same version that the new server is running in order to restore. The original machine is a Dual Pentium III with 2 GB ram with adaptec AIC 7899 SCSI controller

do you have the enterprise or host version of sco? if you have tcp you should be able to use ftp to move tge data from one machine to the other. if both use the same sco license set the ip addresses to different class c networks and use a windows pc with an ip address on each network to talk to both.

It is the enterprise version. Should I copy the entire disk or is there files that should not be copied? Thanks for the input.

i would only copy the data files, assuming that the application programs are the at the same release. is there a separate /u file system?

No there isn�t a /u file system I believe. All data is one folder named /dat. I believe some of the sco files are modified by the Activant application though, so that could be some of my issues.