Many thanks to all who responded. All agreed that the backup slice (slice 2) could be safely recreated without harming data on the other partitions Special thanks to Crist Clark who summed up the issues I raised as follows: > My question is: Can I safely use the format utility to re-create a > standard slice 2 by reassigning it the full range of available > cylinders? Or will that harm the data on the existing partitions? No, it won't touch the data on the drive. However, I'd rewrite the boot blocks, installboot(1M), just to be safe. > Should I forget a slice 2 reconstruction and instead use ufsrestore to > rebuild the system? A much different question. Images made with dd(1) have some drawbacks. You've kind of touched on one here. Using dd(1) actually copies the disk label, so when you copy that back to a new disk, the format may not be appropriate. If the disk is smaller, you're hosed. If it's bigger, you'll have unused space. OTOH, in a bare-metal rebuild, you may like the fact that you don't need to worry about labeling the drive and newfs(1M)ing file systems... provided you have an identical or bigger HDD to work with. The other big drawback of dd(1) images is that you copy all of the "empty" space on the drive. If you have a 50 GB drive with 1 GB of data on it, the dd(1) image will be 50 GB. The ufsdump(1M) will be about 1 GB. Again, this may or may not be important to you. More than the cost of backup media, I find the time it takes to do a dump or restore with dd(1) on today's huge HDDs is getting to be prohibitively long. OTOH, if the partition is almost full of data, the differences disappear. I find ufsdump/ufsrestore(1M) to generally be much better solutions. _____________________________________________ From: Brewer, Dwight R. CONTRACTOR Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2006 9:41 AM To: 'sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org' Subject: server has no slice 2, can I safely create it? We just finished building a trusted solaris server and customizing it. I was about to use dd to copy the entire drive to a backup that will normally be stored off line. However, due to a huge oversight, the person who created our working drive deleted slice 2, the backup partition before the build started. The other partitions / /usr /var and /opt are fine and the system is running without error. What would normally be slice 2 is unassigned and empty, utilizing no cylinders. So the following command fails: dd ifs=/dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s2 ofs=/dev/rdsk/c1t1d0s2 bs=10240 Due to circumstances beyond my control, starting the build over is not an option. I do have ufs dumps to tape of the / /usr /var and /opt filesystems. My question is: Can I safely use the format utility to re-create a standard slice 2 by reassigning it the full range of available cylinders? Or will that harm the data on the existing partitions? Should I forget a slice 2 reconstruction and instead use ufsrestore to rebuild the system? All suggestions welcome! Thanks in advance. Russ . _______________________________________________ sunmanagers mailing list sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagersReceived on Tue Apr 25 09:05:00 2006
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