How to Step Through a CSLT Reinstall
May 12, 2017
Assume you've seen your Series 918 crash to its bones. You replace the 3000 and need to reinstall from CSLT. Many a 3000 site hasn't done this in a long time. This is when you're getting in touch with your independent support company for advice and walking the steps to recovery.
Oh. You don't have a support company to call. One more thing that's been dropped from the budget. You could ask on the 3000 newsgroup for help, so long as your downtime isn't serious. This support strategy is one way to go, and James Byrne got lucky this week. One expert walked him through the critical steps.
"I am working my way through the check-lists for reinstalling from a CSLT," Byrne said, "and I have come to the conclusion this stuff was written more to obscure than to illuminate." The HP documentation advised him to boot from disk, something he couldn't do. "Fortunately this is a backup 3000, and nothing too bad can happen yet."
Gilles Schipper, our esteemed homesteading contributor, provided the answers. The problem lay in a bad boot drive, but how do you discover that's true? We'll get to that in a bit. First, the CSLT reinstall.
"Assuming you have no user volume sets:
1. Mount CSLT in appropriate drive and boot from alternate path
2. From prompt, type INSTALL
3. At completion, boot from primary path and START NORECOVERY (this is your second "boot".)
4. Mount whichever tape contains your directory (could be the CSLT or your latest full backup - if directory on both, use whichever is more current)
5. Log on as MANAGER.SYS and restore directory (:file t;dev=?;restore *t;;directory - note 2 consecutive;)
6. Use VOLUTIL to add additional discs to MPEXL_SYSTEM_VOLUME_SET.
7. Mount backup tape and:
:restore *t;/;keep;create;olddate;partdb
Reboot with START NORECOVERY
Ah, but what to do if you have user volume sets?
Modify step 6 to read as follows:
6. Use VOLUTIL to add additional discs to MPEXL_SYSTEM_VOLUME_SET, as well as any additional user volumesets that you have.
The approprite VOLUTIL commands you will need are:
1. NEWVOL command to add additional volumes to the existing MPEXL_SYSTEM_VOLUME_SET
2. NEWSET command to add first (master) volume of user-volumeset1, say
3. NEWVOL command to add additional volumes to user-volumeset1
4. repeat 2 and 3 for each additional user volumeset
Then, prior to step 7, add step 6A, which is the repeat of step 5, which is to AGAIN restore the directories from the tape containing the directories so that they are restored to the master volumes of their respective user volumesets.
And then step 7 remains as before.
The bad LDEV1 discovery? You can always swap out a known good drive. Byrne did this and noted he had to restock his cache of backup drives. "Only three left," he said. "Time to order more, perhaps." Advice on checking for bad drives before a boot:
"Instead of INSTALL, type ODE," Schipper said. "Then run Mapper. That should show you all of your devices including hard drives. Although that may even show drives that cannot be INSTALL'ed to. Also, check all of your SCSI terminators."
Stan Sieler added this to the remedies for a bad disk. "Try doing:
start norecovery message
"That 'message' option will cause 'start' to generate a **LOT** of output. Hopefully, the last few dozen lines might provide a clue to the problem."
Do all the backup that you need when protecting that HP 3000. The success of its backups falls in the lap of the system's managers. (Running CHECKSLT from the TELESUP account will verify if a CSLT is still good enough to boot your system. You'll want to check that CSLT to ensure it'll run on any tape drive, not just the one it usually runs on. Alignment issues kick DDS drives out of service regularly.) Don't forget about keeping your CSLT healthy.