UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

Hi Spock,

Bringing the data to some kind of near line storage is pretty simple, but you'll need to give us some information regarding the backup medium and method.

I see from the previous posts that the medium is tape, what kind and can you attach it anywhere else?

As to the method, can you tell us if it's tar or dump or cpio or something commercial?

Recovering to disk on an other server and the sharing the drive using NFS is an option, this can even be mounted into a VM or just copied to the VM if it can be recovered.

Regards

Gull04

Re my post#13.......Searching online I have just found documentation that says BIOS options for video shadowing and/or BIOS shadowing should be 'disabled'. Otherwise, memory will be over-written.

I seem to remember that this will screw the boot process.

@hicksd8 - yeah I searched the BIOS for a setting like that and I couldn't seem to find it. I will check again though.


@gull04 - The backups were done with HP SureStore Dat24 internal tape drive, using Microlite BackupEdge "Full Backups", and the tapes are Sony DGD126P type. Like I might have mentioned, our legacy software that runs on this machine is used for looking up historical data, and not an active server. When I was experimenting with the VM I had copied most everything over from the physical machine using ftp and cpio. The legacy app on the VM will not run though, I think because I did not copy over the entire /etc directory, and the reason is that when I got the restore to work in a previous hardware replacement I had to "exclude" the /etc.config file (I think that was the one). Anyway, when I had both the physical and virtual machines running I tried to compare the /etc directories to see which ones I needed, because using cpio on each one was too time consuming. Now I wish I had spent the time to try each directory, because I feel something is missing from there that my app needs to run correctly. I have purchased a newer USB HP SureStore DAT24 drive, but I have not had any luck "attaching" it to the VM so that the SCO installation will recognize it. I don't know what the options are as far as restoring the data - would it work to restore it to a Windows machine or VM? I have all kinds of resources here (thankfully) as far as Windows XP and Windows 7 working models. I also can probably purchase anything that I might need to get this job accomplished.



I can also try to replace more parts in the physical server, so far I think I have eliminated these as the problem: video card, monitor, hard drive, memory (tested OK), IDE cable, PATA/SATA adapter, power supply. Any suggestions are, as always, greatly appreciated.

Can you boot unix.old

I have had a chance to try a few more things, I was focused for a while on this error message that I noticed at some point when the problem first started:



Open event driver failed.... Fatal server error.... Check mouse configuration


I started to read up on mouse configurations, and probably just wasted a bunch of time because even though I can go into unix.safe and add/remove a mouse to reconfigure, whenever it builds the new kernel, environment, etc. I'm not really going to see those changes because I can never boot up in the "regular" unix kernel - right?


So here's what I now have: HD #1 with previously working O/S and legacy app. HD #2 with fresh O/S installation. I can easily power down and switch between the two hard drives for testing, and here is what I can do with each one:


HD #1 - I can boot into unix.safe in either maintenance mode or regular mode, but in regular mode I have no mouse control in the graphical interface. I cannot boot into unix.old or just a blank (unix) boot, whenever it reaches the "Loading kernel" part the machine does a restart.


HD #2 - I can boot into unix.safe in either maintenance mode or regular mode, but again no mouse control in the GI. I can boot into unix.old, but no help there. I cannot do a straight boot (unix), it does the same restart when the loading kernel process begins.


So my only thoughts now are something with the motherboard - maybe the primary IDE port or channel is malfunctioning, or it really has something to do with the PS/2 mouse port? The only thing that makes sense to me is something to do with the IDE channel, since the restart seems to be triggered whenever any kind of "load" is put on the HD. Does this even make sense?

boot using unix.safe.
run /etc/scologin disable
shutdown
boot using unix
if this boot fails then the mouse is not the problem.

@jgt - I disabled the scologin per your instructions. The boot into unix still triggers a restart at kernel loading. I think I may have found one of these motherboards online, I have to check into it. If I go replacing major components like that, will I have other issues trying to use with my existing HD?