[comp.unix.questions] Disaster Recovery Disk and Driver Installation

rick@tmiuv0.uucp (06/04/90)

Please bear with me -- this may seem like stupid questions but I need
answers...

First, on an ESIX (386 Unix) system, how would I build a minimal boot disk
to recover my system from a CPIO tape from a crash?  The tape is a Wangtek
5150 SCSI device.  I have the drivers currently installed (obviously!).

Second, how difficult is it to embed a foreign device driver in a disk build
set?  Reason:  We are looking at implementing Unix as our system platform,
but we need to use a SCSI device driver from a different vendor.  The Unix
we wish to use doesn't know about this driver, so their build disks don't
have it.  The SCSI vendor has a driver which will work on a different 386
System V-derived system (if you want the gory details, the other 386 system
is SCO Unix, the SCSI vendor I cannot name).  What I would like to do is 
build a system generation diskette set with this driver slapped in.

Are these possible?  How difficult?  Should I seek therapy?

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art@pegasus.com (Art Neilson) (06/07/90)

I just got thru building a disaster disk for my system, after reading 
some articles from others on the net who have done the same 8^).
The place for you to start is make a copy of your ESIX boot/install
diskette.  Put the diskette in the drive and mount it like so:
mount /dev/dsk/f0 /mnt.  You'll get a message warning you about
install mounted on /mnt, this is because the disk file system name
doesn't match the name of the dir you're mounting it on (see labelit(1M) ).
Now you can just cd into /mnt and start exploring.  The biggest problem
I ran across was disk space, my floppies only hold 1.2MB and I was hard
pressed to fit everything I wanted on the disk.  You may want to strip
all the utilities on the disk and replace the unix on the disk with a
minimally configured kernel you build via kconfig.  It can have *just*
those drivers required, mine has the Wangtek driver in it so I can 
boot from floppy, much around with the drive with the disk* utilities,
do my mkfs's and restore from tape. Remember to mknod the tape devices
on the disaster floppy after copying your minimally configured unix
to it.
-- 
Arthur W. Neilson III		| ARPA: art@pegasus.com
Bank of Hawaii Tech Support	| UUCP: uunet!ucsd!nosc!pegasus!art