dd restore

The Oracle group here in the company asked me once to troubleshoot their old Ultra60, call if BOX-BAD. The boot SCSI disk was totally gone. Luckily they had second Ultra60, call it BOX-GOOD, with almost identical configuration. So I did next:

• Place the boot disk from the BOX-GOOD into the BOX-BAD. Also in BOX-BAD replace dead disk with new/spare one.
• Boot the BOX-BAD from the cdrom (Solaris 8) into S mode.
• OK, both disks are visible with format command.
• Copy VTOC from good disk to spare disk (in this case disk c0t0d0)
• command: prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/c0t1d0s2 | fmthard -s - /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s2
• Use dd command to copy data from good disk to spare one, using block size of 1M byte, hoping to copy data faster.
• command: dd if=/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s2 of=/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s2 bs=1024k
• Install boot block on new disk with command:
• command: /usr/sbin/installboot bootblk /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0
• Return first disk to the BOX-GOOD. Boot BOX-BAD from new disk and change hostname/IP.