One of the things that I have taken for granted was that I can *always* boot a Sun server with a CDROM or DVD or jumpstart "boot net -srv" and get to a prompt. That allows me to fsck filesystems and ufsdump to tape if needed. In fact, I have generally done obscure things like fully install a server and then, with everything working fine, booted with CDROM and dumped the system to tape and I call that my "ground zero" backup tape. Everything that follows after that is incremental for a while until the next level 0 dump. [1] Well I just did a boot net -sv on my server here and have snv-b52 at the prompt. I was able to fsck the basic UFS filesystems on this machine as it was running snv-b46. I attached a tape drive before booting and am therefore able to ufsdump and verify the contents of the snv-b46 UFS filesystems to tape. This is all a good thing. My problem is that the snv-46 machine also had a zpool and multiple ZFS filesystems. Simply running "zfs list" here at the prompt gets me nothing of course. Can I create or otherwise recover some XML file from the snv-46 server filesystems in order to gain access to those ZFS filesystems from this "noot boot" shell? Is there any way to backup those ZFS filesystems while booted from CDROM/DVD or boot net ? Essentially, if I had nothing but bare metal here and a tape drive can I access the zpool that resides on six 36GB disks on controller 2 or am I dead in the water ? -- Dennis Clarke
Dennis, i''m not sure if this will help you, but i had something similar happen and was able to get my zpool back. i decided to install (not upgrade) Nevada snv-51 which was the current build at the time. I had (and thankfully still have) a zpool which i''d created under snv-37 on a separite disk zpool list showed nothing and i thought i''d lost everything on there. So i went to create a new zpool on the same disk and zpool told me that there was already a zpool there called pool1 and suggested that i do an import. From memory i had to use the -f flag and voila, everything was back to normal. Sweet! cheers peter This message posted from opensolaris.org
> Dennis, > i''m not sure if this will help you, but i had something similar happen and > was able to get my zpool back. > > i decided to install (not upgrade) Nevada snv-51 which was the current build > at the time. I had (and thankfully still have) a zpool which i''d created > under snv-37 on a separite disk > > zpool list showed nothing and i thought i''d lost everything on there. So i > went to create a new zpool on the same disk and zpool told me that there was > already a zpool there called pool1 and suggested that i do an import. From > memory i had to use the -f flag and voila, everything was back to normal. > Sweet!I just did a clean install of snv-b52 and am looking at the exact same situation. Let''s face it .. ZFS is just wonderful. [ insert small voice here ] except for backup and restore features [ back to yelling ] things are working great here after the import. Dennis