Unix Backup and Recovery

System Recovery with Backup Tape

Bare-metal recovery on an SGI system can be performed by the Recover System Maintenance Menu choice as long as you have a full backup tape made with the Backup command. When an SGI system boots, you are given a chance to stop the boot process by pressing the Escape key, which will present the System Maintenance Menu. If the SGI system has a graphics capability, you can either press Escape or click on the Stop for Maintenance button. Note that some SGI systems are configured to always stop at the System Maintenance Menu, so this step may not be necessary (the menu just appears).

Starting up the system...

To perform system maintenance instead, press Esc

Your system should stop and print out the following System Maintenance Menu, or display it graphically.

System Maintenance Menu
   (1) Start System
   (2) Install System Software
   (3) Run Diagnostics
   (4) Recover System
   (5) Enter Command Monitor

To start bare-metal recovery, you first should boot the standalone version of fx to ensure that the system disk partition table is intact. You can do this from either a local CD-ROM drive or a remote directory. To boot the standalone fx from a local CD-ROM drive, first choose option 5, enter Command Monitor. At the command monitor, you first should make sure that all the hardware you expect to be available is shown by the hinv command:

>> hinv System: IP22 Processor: 250 Mhz R4400, with FPU Primary I-cache size: 16 Kbytes Primary D-cache size: 16 Kbytes Secondary cache ...