OSR 6 disaster recovery

Hello All,

I have found the new "emergency_disk" and "emergency_rec" to be a tad
limited in practice - I'm sure it's just me.

I had completed a load of OSR 6, MP3 and various other drivers and
third-party utilities. I decided to create an emergency boot floppy -
oops CD now. The boot media was created using emergency_disk and I
tested the media by booting from it. The boot process was completely
hidden by the splash screen so I could not see what "drivers" it was
loading. It finally deposited me at a sparse menu that gave me a few
choices. BEWARE - you can't test the tape by choosing the menu choice
that seems to be appropriate for this - it goes right into trying to
recovery your system with NO prompts or confirmation. This also
rendered my disk with no fdisk table - obliterating my install. No
worries, right? I mean I have a couple of backups I made prior to
doing this - one was SCO's "emergency_rec" utility to create a tape
for use in restoring your system. Of course, now I know that tape
does not have everything on it.

So after completely rebuilding the system, I called BRU (my backup
utility vendor) to discuss the method they recommend. They say a bare
metal restore is done by reloading the OS, re-installing BRU and
finally overwriting your fresh install from tape - right over the
booted and active filesystem! just reboot, I was told, it'll be fine.

Isn't this an extremely large step backwards in the restore
procedure? I use to boot from emergency floppy (that I was able to
add my third-party binaries to) and create fdisk partitions,
filesystem (divvy) tables, restore from tape directly, and voila back
in business.

What is the consensus? How do you provide bare-metal recovery on an
OSR 6 system?

--Steve
.

Relevant Pages

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