ado@alw.nih.gov (Arthur David Olson) (07/02/90)
As I understand it, the reason for doing dumps in single-user mode is to ensure that the file system being dumped does not change in mid-dump (since a mid-dump change could make the dump useless). Since umounting a file system (or mounting it read-only) guards against mid-dump changes, doing so should be an alternative to going single user. In fact, that's what we've done here for quarterly level-zero dumps; we'd go single-user to do the root and /usr dumps, then return to multi-user mode, umounting, dumping, and remounting the other (large) disk partitions in turn. June 30 was the first time we'd tried doing this under SunOS 4.1. We experienced the crashing that's been reported here previously by others--despite our careful umounting. Oh well. Arthur David Olson ado@alw.nih.gov ADO is a trademark of Ampex.