[Info-vax] image backup on itanium

[hb]

On 05/03/2015 11:06 AM, Hans Vlems wrote:
> Correct, but the cause was a missing correct EFI entry for the cloned
disk. The physical device proved alright once the EFI entry was provided
(via boot_options.com)
> Hans
>

To me a cloned disk means an identical copy, block by block, byte by 
byte, bit by bit.

You didn't clone the system disk. The GUID is in the second and last 
block of the system disk and as far as I understand these blocks 
were/are not copied by backup/image. (The image backup is - 
intentionally - different in other places as well, but that doesn't 
matter for booting.)

To make a clone, I would use foreign mounted disks and COPY, or
BACKUP/PHYSICAL (which I couldn't try: BACKUP-F-LOGIONOPRIV). The unix 
tool dd should do also, no matter whether you use it from GNV (and know 
what 'dd: failed to open 'lda34:': i/o error' means) or any booted unix 
system.

I think a cloned disk will work as you initially expected: to be 
bootable in the unchanged EFI boot environment. Maybe, if you don't 
remove the original system disk, EFI will complain about two disks with 
identical GUIDs. Maybe it boots just from the first (or last) disk with 
the known GUID: I have no idea and can't test it. But if you remove the 
original system disk, the system should boot from the clone.

Also, bootable in this context is not clear to me. If you mean bootable 
from the EFI boot menu, or automatically at power on, then the VMS image 
backup of the system disk is not bootable. But as mentioned in other 
posts, you can always get into the EFI shell and select the cloned disk 
and boot VMS. This is not really an option for the system disk, but it 
is more than "good enough" for a VMS distribution disk. To me this looks 
like the disk is "bootable".

As mentioned in other posts, COPY from the DVD image (sometimes referred 
to as the .iso file, which you get as an hobbyist) to a foreign mounted 
disk makes that disk "bootable". And, because you usually boot from that 
disk only to install VMS, it may not be (and never was for me) worth to 
make that disk bootable from the EFI boot menu. When installing VMS, the 
target system disk will be entered into the EFI boot menu and that's all 
I needed.