On Dec 10, 2007 5:40 AM, Khalid Schofield <lists@sgi.materials.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
quoted text
> Hi,
> random question. I've a sun system running obsd 4.2. I though I didn'
> have a scsi card with openfirmware so I installed on an IDE disk and
> spent ages configuring the system. It's a mail server also so I don't
> have the time to have a few hours of down time.
>
> How would I go about cloning the 80Gb IDE disk which has only a few
> Gb's in use to my 73Gb scsi disk? Also what boot variables need to be
> set in openfirmware to get it to autoboot from the scsi disk?

There's no way to do this without downtime, but you can probably
minimize it by 1) cloning over the network (i.e. put the scsi in a
different box, and use `scp mailserver:/$part dev_box:/mnt/$part`
(where part is one of 'home', 'usr', 'var') 2) figuring out what files
are getting written to and cloning them last, since you must shutdown
the mailserver for this or risk losing consistency. Since it's a
mailserver, you can probably copy every partition except for var
without shutting down the machine.
You can't copy the disklabels directly because the disks are different
sizes, so you'll have to re-disklabel manually. Plug the scsi into an
extra box OpenBSD box you have lying around (you have extras, right?).
fdisk and disklabel the scsi. Mount its partitions somewhere (I
suggested /mnt/$part but you can pick).
Does this help?

-Nick