[Info-vax] Best "Standalone" boot versions for Alpha and Itanium

[Michael Moroney]

Rich Jordan <jordan at ccs4vms.com> writes:


You say you don't have volume shadowing but do have a single "spare" 
drive.  Shadowing would be best since you can add spare drives and run
with essentially zero downtime, although shadow copies are much slower
than backup is.

My suggestion is to do a BACKUP/IMAGE of the DVD to the spare drive and
boot from the spare drive, since DVDs are SLOW and running from a DVD may
cause you to exceed your time window.  You can do this before taking the
system down.  It can be useful to have a spare bootable disk around 
anyway.

Booting from the extra drive (or DVD) means all your "real" drives aren't
being used as a system disk or anything so you can avoid doing a
BACKUP/IGNORE=INTERLOCK anywhere.  It's usually badness.

For itanics, V8.4 Update 5 or later (including V8.4-1H1) should be fine.