Solaris

Hi all...I have an old Sun Ultra 2 running SunOS 5.7 (I know old). These machines have 2 hard drives and one of my drives fried. I bought some replacement drives and wanted to a simple "dd" command from my one good drive to copy all to the new replacement drive. The new drives however give me a bad geometry command from slot #2 when I try to copy. When I try to boot the new drives they will not. I'm guessing there is a procedure I need to complete before doing any type of copying to these drives. Can anyone help?
Thanks in advance.

are the disks the same geometry (make, model, size, etc) ?

That is the error I'm getting....bad geometry

---------- Post updated at 11:19 AM ---------- Previous update was at 11:09 AM ----------

I have a couple existing drives. One appears to not be the same exact model....now, when I use one that is the same model to copy from I am getting an I/O error, does the physical drive need to be named properly or is the name tied to the slot it is inserted in?

---------- Post updated at 11:20 AM ---------- Previous update was at 11:19 AM ----------

I have a couple existing drives. One appears to not be the same exact model....now, when I use one that is the same model to copy from I am getting an I/O error, does the physical drive need to be named properly or is the name tied to the slot it is inserted in?

It would help if you answer to the questions that have been asked, i.e. tell what make, model, size and geometry are the old and new drives.

In any case, cloning a disk is usually done by copying the vtoc, then copying the data from the slices containing them, then installing the boot loader if a system disk.

However, it is unclear what you are trying to achieve. Backups are to be done before a drive fails, not after that. Were the two original disks configured in as a mirror ?

Hey...I am using Seagate ST39204LC 9GB drives in both instances at this point (new and old). Not sure of geometry.....where would I access that info? The new drive does not boot. I just wanted to copy everything on my existing drive to this new drive.

I have back-up of everything don't know where that came from.

If the disks are the same brand and model, they have the same geometry.

I still don't get what you are trying to do. Let me rephrase what I understand:

You have two servers, each one with two disks. One of the disks died and the affected server no more boots. You believe cloning either a hard disk from the other server or the other one on the same server will fix the issue. Please clarify that last point.

To keep it simple...I am using one server with two hard drive slots. I issued a simple "dd" command .... "dd if=/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s2 of=/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s2 bs=2048k" to copy the contents of my good (boot) drive to this new (backup) drive. The address listed on the "of" portion of the dd command is what my prior secondary drive used.....could that be the issue?

I am no longer getting a geometry error at this point being that I am using identical drives.... thanks for you help.