Good!



Are you meaning you (pyhsically) removed hdisk0, put some other disk in and repeated? Well this is destined to fail:

With AIX you have all disks controlled by the LVM: you can't just rip out a disk and expect it to work. By "controlled by LVM" i mean: on the disk itself is a block (the "VGDA", volume group descriptor area) which states of which disks ("PV"s in LVM speak) the VG is comprised of. A copy of this VGDA si on each disk and if you rip one out the LVM recognizes that there is one missing (and which one that is).

If you wanted to clone the data (to another system or for archiving purposes) you won't get anywhere with the mirrorvg command, you need a different procedure: mksysb or savevg. (Notice that there is a splitvg command now, but only in recent AIX versions, not in AIX 5.x.)

You can store the contents of a single VG to a file or tape using the savevg command. In fact this is a customized backup-format backup of the VGs contents plus some additional information. From such an image you can use the restvg command to restore the VG onto new media (even on a new system). The disks used don't need to be exactly the same as in the original, they just have to provide some minimum requirements (if the LVs where mirrored you will need two disks, etc.).

Instead of a savevg you can also use a mksysb command. Basically this is a savevg rootvg (so everything said above applies) but with some additional information and a boot block. It is possible to boot a newly created system with such a mksysb-image and restore the contents of the rootvg while doing so. Since the rootvg contains everything relevant for the system you have a method of cloning/restoring a system completely from such an image.

Notice that the boot image is NOT added if you save the mksysb image to a file. You can still boot from a boot medium and then use the file to restore the system but you boot directly from the image only if it is on a DVD, tape or similar.

I hope this helps.

bakunin