How to copy a Solaris boot drive to a disk with a different partition layout
If you’ve ever gone to mirror a system drive with Solstice Disk suite, you know how frustrating it can be when you either don’t have any more slices to use for your meta database partitions, or all the space on the disk has already been allocated to existing partitions. While Disk Suite only requires one partition be reserved for its meta database information on boot drives, two are really suggested for redundancy purposes, and in the example below, I found myself needing to mirror a system disk that had only one remaining partition, and no space left that could be used for the meta database.
While I could have taken a small amount of space from the swap partition and re-allocated it to a new meta database partition on slice 7, this solution would not have been elegant, and I would have still only had one meta database partition. As it stood, the system had the following filesystems on the following disk slices:
c1t0d0
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In order to bring the system into line with my standards and prepare it for proper mirroring, I would have to carve up another disk, and migrate the data to it.
Here is what the partition table on the new disk looked like:
c1t2d0
Current partition table (original):
Total disk cylinders available: 24620 + 2 (reserved cylinders)
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Now that everything is all laid out, we can start moving all the data from c1t0d0 to c1t2d0, keeping in mind that we will be merging /usr/local onto /usr on the new system disk… Here we go
Make a new filesystem for /:
# newfs /dev/rdsk/c1t2d0s0
newfs: /dev/rdsk/c1t2d0s0 last mounted as /
newfs: construct a new file system /dev/rdsk/c1t2d0s0: (y/n)? Y
Mount the new / filesystem as /mnt:
# mount -F ufs -o rw /dev/dsk/c1t2d0s0 /mnt
Move the data from c1t0d0s0 to c1t2d0s0:
# ufsdump 0f - / | ( cd /mnt ;ufsrestore xvf - )
Add links
Set directory mode, owner, and times.
set owner/mode for ‘.’? [yn] y
Directories already exist, set modes anyway? [yn] y
DUMP: 405886 blocks (198.19MB) on 1 volume at 406 KB/sec
DUMP: DUMP IS DONE
Unmount /mnt
# umount /mnt
That’s the general idea… Now we just have to do the same thing for the other partitions, leaving out swap, backup, and our two meta database partitions of course. These partitions (1,2,3 and 4) should be left alone for the time being, as they are never mounted as filesystems.
# newfs /dev/rdsk/c1t2d0s5
# mount -F ufs -o rw /dev/dsk/c1t2d0s5 /mnt
# ufsdump 0f - /opt | ( cd /mnt ;ufsrestore xvf - )
# umount /mnt
# newfs /dev/rdsk/c1t2d0s6
# mount -F ufs -o rw /dev/dsk/c1t2d0s5 /mnt
# ufsdump 0f - /usr | ( cd /mnt ;ufsrestore xvf - )
# umount /mnt
# newfs /dev/rdsk/c1t2d0s7
# mount -F ufs -o rw /dev/dsk/c1t2d0s5 /mnt
# ufsdump 0f - /var | ( cd /mnt ;ufsrestore xvf - )
# umount /mnt
Finally, the /usr/local partition
# mount -F ufs -o rw /dev/dsk/c1t2d0s5 /mnt
# ufsdump 0f - /usr/local | ( cd /mnt/local ;ufsrestore xvf - )
# umount /mnt
Now that we have all the data moved, we still don’t have a disk that is bootable. Since the whole idea here is for us to end up with a new bootable system disk, we have to install bootblocks onto the new system disk. This is done with the installboot command:
# installboot /usr/platform/`uname -i`/lib/fs/ufs/bootblk /dev/rdsk/c1t2d0s0
Now that we have the bootblocks needed to boot the solaris kernel, the last thing we have to do is make sure our new vfstab file points to all the right partitions.
Mount the new / partition:
# mount -F ufs -o rw /dev/dsk/c1t2d0s0 /mnt
Edit the new vfstab file:
# vi /mnt/etc/vfstab
For the information given in this example, this file will contain the following entries:
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Notice that the target number will remain 2, not move to 0 when we swap the disks and boot from the new one. To resolve this, it is strongly suggested that you rebuild the solaris device tree and change the vfstab file to reflect the new disk position.
That is everything! We now shutdown the system, swap the positions of c1t0d0 and c1t2d0 and reboot off our new system disk. We are now ready to move onto the mirroring process.
Discuss This Article
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13 Responses to “How to copy a Solaris boot drive to a disk with a different partition layout”
Got something to say?
[...] If you ever shift around any bootable drives within a Sun Solaris box, you may find that either the device names (cxtxd0sx) do not follow the disk position within the server, or, the system just fails to boot because it can’t mount the other disk slices. [...]
[...] I had great fun following this process today. I made it to the last bit, but after rebooting the system wants to mount / as a read-only file system, freaks out about not being able to create /tmp, execute cron jobs and do a handful of other really important things and then presents a login prompt. [...]
This sounds like it may be caused by mixed up device links. Did you rebilid them?
[...] What is the reputation of the site in question from other, possibly more reputable sites? For instance, Cliff wrote some instructions on Solaris partitioning which were linked by Sun support shortly after that. A link like that gives a high level of confidence in the content presented. [...]
[...] You can also use my instructions for copying a Solaris boot drive to a disk with a different partition layout as a safer alternative. [...]
Should these be set to slice 6 and 7 respectively?
EG # mount -F ufs -o rw /dev/dsk/c1t2d0s6/mnt
and
# mount -F ufs -o rw /dev/dsk/c1t2d0s7 /mnt
instead of just using s5
# newfs /dev/rdsk/c1t2d0s6
# mount -F ufs -o rw /dev/dsk/c1t2d0s5 /mnt
# ufsdump 0f - /usr | ( cd /mnt ;ufsrestore xvf - )
# umount /mnt
# newfs /dev/rdsk/c1t2d0s7
# mount -F ufs -o rw /dev/dsk/c1t2d0s5 /mnt
# ufsdump 0f - /var | ( cd /mnt ;ufsrestore xvf - )
# umount /mnt
Finally, the /usr/local partition
# mount -F ufs -o rw /dev/dsk/c1t2d0s5 /mnt
# ufsdump 0f - /usr/local | ( cd /mnt/local ;ufsrestore xvf - )
# umount /mnt
I have used the above procedure to copy the contents of an entire disk over to a different disk. It worked very nicely, and now I have a system with a mirrored disk set (using DiskSuite).
Thanks, great article
js
Hey JS,
I’m glad the article was helpful to you
You may also want to boot to an alternative source (cd/dvd/net) in order to ensure that you are not trying to deal with changing content
[...] some of the files in those directories are larger than 8 Gigabytes. One solution is to use a “ufsdump pipe to ufsrestore” command, but I have even had problems with this from time to time. My perfered method these [...]
Good document.
With this document I did on SUNfire 440 with Solaris 10. But problem is that its took long time to take backup & restore with 3 GB data using #ufsdump 0f - /usr | ( cd /mnt ;ufsrestore xvf - )
Near about 3 hours it tooks take backup & restore with 3 gb data.
Is there any solution to minimise the time.
One more thing I am not able to rebuild /etc/path_to_inst file with following command in Solaris 10 release 10/6
# devfsadm -r /mnt -p /mnt/etc/path_to_inst
Thanks …
Prasen
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Thanks for this article, I’ve just used it to move to a bigger drive in my E4500.