Homegrown Bare-Metal Recovery
This procedure for recovering a failed SGI IRIX system takes a few shortcuts from what SGI would have you do. Their recommendation is to perform an IRIX installation, followed by the use of restore (or xfsrestore for restoring XFS dumps). We will bypass the IRIX installation and instead use the miniroot to perform the bare-metal recovery.
In order to perform this type of bare-metal recovery you will need
the correct IRIX installation tape or CD-ROM or a bootable IRIX tape
(only for IRIX 5.3 and 6.1). You also will need your current
dump volumes, along with a listing of which
partitions are on what volumes and in what order, and printed copies
of the output of the hinv command, the
system’s partition and volume header information, and the
/etc/fstab file. You might guess that it is a
little difficult to keep track of how many tape files a dump is made
up of and much easier to recover a system during a panic situation if
you keep your dump volumes simple.
The installation media and configuration information needs to be gathered before disaster strikes. You should periodically print out all of the system configuration information. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to return a failed system to its original state without these things.
Finding the partition information for each drive can be accomplished using the prtvtoc command. You would run the command once for each disk drive attached to the system and print the results:
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