HP-UX Booting from a system recovery Tape

Recently one of our HP-UX servers went down and it needed recovery. Since I’m new to HP UX one of our senior UNIX admin pointed me that they have a system recovery tape. After going through our internal docs and other resources, I was able to recover system :)

Here is what I did...

First I had put recovery tape into the tape driver

As soon as system started (auto boot) I had to interrupt the autoboot sequence (press ESC key) and load tape into driver
Next I had type 'search ipl' command so that it will search for my recovery tape driver
> search ipl

It will give output of different devices such as Random access media, look for Sequential Access Media (and its path number or hw path).
Here is what I typed to boot from tape (in my system

> boot 8/16/5.0
OR
> boot p2

Replace 8/16/5.0 or p2 with your actual tape drive h/w path. Once booting started, it will automatically restore it.

It took almost an hour to recover but it did the job. This tape made my system bootable. Next task was to restore all data from full and incremental backup and install needed additional software. I had typed following command on HP-UX box to restore all files and directory:

# frecover –f /dev/rmt/0m –rv

This emergency came around 5pm evening last Friday. I was just closing for that day and I was about to go home. I had spent 4 hours to restore box and other stuff.

Well good news it that my diwali holidays starts from coming Friday and it will lasted until November 7, 2005 :). I really need a break guys :D.