Copy a Solaris Boot Drive to a New Disk

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

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)

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:

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.