ade@clark.uucp (Adrian Miranda) (06/30/90)
Thanks to those who responded to my question about creating a recovery diskette that would create the correct number of partitions on my hard drive. (Conor P. Cahill, Steve Nuchia, and I think someone else.) I do have a few more questions. As a reminder we are running ESIX System V R3.2 on a Cheetah 486, and the regular install procedure refuses to create enough partitions. I want a diskette that will partition the drive then load the backup off tape after a hard drive failure. It was suggested that I keep a copy of the final /etc/partitions on my diskette, and run mkpart to set up the partitions. Now, of course I need to run mkpart for the root, usr, swap, etc, partitions. But there are some extra entries in my /etc/partitions file for reserved, alts, and trkalt, whatever those are. Do I need to run mkpart for these as well? Also, when I run mkfs, should I be specifying gap, and blocks/cylinder? If so, how do I determine gap? Once again, if anyone has a working recovery diskette for UNIX/386, I would certainly be interested in seeing it, or at least the script that does the work. Thanks in advance. Adrian Miranda uunet!clark!ade
cpcahil@virtech.uucp (Conor P. Cahill) (06/30/90)
In article <1990Jun30.010038.8714@clark.uucp> ade@clark.uucp (Adrian Miranda) writes: >Once again, if anyone has a working recovery diskette for UNIX/386, >I would certainly be interested in seeing it, or at least the script >that does the work. Thanks in advance. My solution to recovery (a: because I am lazy, b: because I don't have the time to experiment, c: because I can't keep our machine down that long) is to do the following: A: make a cpio diskette that contains the /unix with tape driver installed. Make sure the /dev entries for the tape drive are included on the diskette (tar can't do this, you must use cpio or make a mountable diskette. I prefer cpio). B: Keep up-to date backups of your system C: When all is lost, pull out the original install disk and start the full installation. D: Be sure to set up your partitions as you need them (follow the mechanism you used to set them up before, including the mechanism for creating more then 3 partitions that is described in the FAQ) E: reboot system & load rest of core (total of 4 diskettes) F: Load in the /unix and /dev entries from the diskette mentioned in A G: reboot F: reload your system from the backup tapes. This does work (I know from experience, we lost our main drive (680MB) back in Feb) and it doesn't take that much time. The only "critical" part is to to remember the disk partitioning stuff (actually you could restore root and then setup the rest of the partitions using the /etc/partitions file that you read from the restore. Then the only partition you have to have correct is the root partition. -- Conor P. Cahill (703)430-9247 Virtual Technologies, Inc., uunet!virtech!cpcahil 46030 Manekin Plaza, Suite 160 Sterling, VA 22170