SUMMARY: (Late-OOPS) Recovering Solaris/Intel with NetBackup 4.5

Well my approach was correct, but my SPARC experience got in the way


It turns out there is a huge difference between how Intel and SPARC boots
with Solaris.

In the SPARC world you have to install the boot block on the root slice of
the boot disk.

In the Intel World you have to install the boot block on slice 2 of the boot
disk.  Furthermore, the way I am trying to do it, I have two instanced of
Solaris installed on the same physical disk.  The idea is that if I need to
restore, I can just boot to the second instance which is installed on slice
7 and then newfs the other file systems, mount them, and initiate the
restore.  I don't actually need to install the boot block because there is
already a valid boot block on the disk.

Note:  The Sun answerbook for Solaris 8 tells you that you need to install
it on slice 0, like you do in SPARC; however, some further diging in
sunsolve and I was able to find a bug report about that document.  It is
indeed slice 2.

Original question:
**********
Hi all,

	Here are the specifics.  CPQ DL360 - RAID1 (36GB Drives) with
Solaris 8 01/01.

	Using the same premise as Solaris on SPARC, you can not recover the
operating system without an alternate path restore.  On Solaris on SPARC I
generally install the core OS and the NBU agent on an alternate disk...then
do an Alternate Path restore..i.e.  From / to /a/.  This works.  However on
Solaris for Intel I have come into some issues.  Basically I install the
core OS with the NBU agent on slice 7 of the disk....and also install it as
per normal on the other slices.
Slices 0-6 are used for the production instance and my thoughts are...hey if
we need to recover...we just change the boothpath and boot from slice 7 and
then restore slices 0-6.  I alluded to this in one of my previous postings
about installing two instances of Solaris on a single drive.

	Darren Dunham mentioned that I would have some strange behaviour (he
was right).  Part of me wishes I could just roll this out on SPARC but as
with most people I am on a budget crunch.  I have a feeling it has something
to do with the bootblk.  I have tried setting this up with a specific
x86boot partition and without that boot partition.  I have used installboot
to install the bootblk.  When all said and done I always get the same
result.  Can't boot from /pci@0,0/pcie11,4040@1/sd@0,0:a - Slice not
allocated.  If I boot back
to slice 7 I can confirm that these are the device names of the disk in
question.

	I am hoping to have a recovery solution in place for this system in
early Jan so I can roll out a production syslog server.  Any suggestions you
can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks and will summarize.

Marco.
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