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

[Rich Jordan]

On Wednesday, January 13, 2016 at 2:28:58 PM UTC-6, Michael Moroney wrote:
> Rich Jordan  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.

Michael
     We got on the system and confirmed the backup system disk is (still) in place on the 'spare' unmounted disk.  Disk analysis was fine.  It has been many years since it was booted but its the same version as the production OS (a few patches were not on it).  Assuming it boots, which is likely, we will use it for the image backups of all the other disks including the production system disk, to tape, and if that fails and we have time, to staging disks.

     I cannot take the system down before the scheduled time, for any reason.

     Is there a way to use the distribution DVD to install VMS onto a disk while the system is actually running off of a live system disk?  I know you can do the minimal bootable installtion onto a disk from the live running system, but can you install a full VMS to a spare disk on a running VMS system?  I'm not going to just image the DVD over to the disk ahead of time and lose the existing option for booting and backing up, and that would be the 'standalone' version running, not a real install.

     If it all goes wrong and the move has to happen despite no 100% clean backup, we'll pull one disk of each mirror pair and transport them separately (we found appropriate packaging and case) as a precaution.  What can be done will be done.