Re: [SAGE] AIX: Restore from mksysb has missing device special files

[rudi@bu.edu (Kevin Ruderman)]

Ng Pheng Siong wrote:
>I had occasion to restore an AIX machine from a mksysb tape made on the
>same machine.

>The restoration appears fine, but the device special files for filesystems 
>on other than the first hard disk are missing, so the system is unable to
>mount them. (I'm assuming the data is intact there. ;-)

>Googling, I find references to commands like getlvodm, synclvodm, importvg,
>etc. Are these the magic knobs?

The correct way to access the data is to use importvg.  You will need to
do this once for each volume group on the "old" system (not including the
root volume group rootvg, the mksysb restore created that).

You might have had 1 volume group with all 3 other disks or up to 3 separate
volume groups with one disk each. If there are multiple disks in a volume 
group AIX will figure it out for you!

You only need to specify one disk name from the volume group and AIX should
find the other members of the group, check they are all there, get them,
figure out all the filesystems in the volume group and create entries in
/etc/filesystems for you. 

To see what disks you have and what volume groups AIX knows they are in
so far use 'lspv'. Does it look something like this:

hdisk0         000179124a09c405    rootvg         
hdisk1         00017912034d4408    None           
hdisk2         00017912034d8491    None           
hdisk3         00017912034db248    None           

Before you try this ... is this a standalone system? Are any other machines
cabled to these disks? My experience does NOT include concurrent access VGs.

To access the volume group that lived on hdisk1 you could run:

   importvg -y myvg01 hdisk1

The name of the volume group will be 'myvg01'. If the volume group was
just on that 1 disk lspv would show:

hdisk0         000179124a09c405    rootvg         
hdisk1         00017912034d4408    myvg01
hdisk2         00017912034d8491    None           
hdisk3         00017912034db248    None           

If that VG was made up of all 3 disks you would be done and would see:

hdisk0         000179124a09c405    rootvg         
hdisk1         00017912034d4408    myvg01
hdisk2         00017912034d8491    myvg01
hdisk3         00017912034db248    myvg01

Rudi
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Kevin Ruderman
Information Technology    Boston University