Everhart,Glenn From: mathog@seqaxp.bio.caltech.edu Sent: Friday, May 08, 1998 3:47 PM To: Info-VAX@Mvb.Saic.Com Subject: Re: duplicate a WNT alpha system disk? In article <6isr3f$l6b@gap.cco.caltech.edu>, mathog@seqaxp.bio.caltech.edu writes: > > I have a copy of WNT 4.0 sp3 on an external disk on an AlphaStation, and > want to move it to an internal disk, replacing the DU system disk that > was there. > Here's the final scoop on this. Short answer, you CAN use the VMS boot CDROM to copy the contents of one NT disk onto another, same size or larger disk, and end up with a usable NT system on the new disk. At least this is true on Digital's own Alpha based systems - it probably is also true for any other system that supports VMS, but not for SCSI alpha systems in general, and no way it will work for ATA/IDE systems. Here are the steps, assume source is dka300, target is dka0: 1. Shutdown, hook up second disk 2. set console to SRM 3. Boot the OpenVMS CD 4. select 7 (DCL) 5. $$$ mount/for/over=id dka300: 6. $$$ mount/for/over=id dka0: 7. $$$ copy dka300: dka0: (Thanks to gotfryd@stanpol.com.pl for step 7, as BACKUP/PHYSICAL won't work if the disks are not identical.) At this point you can boot NT off the newly created disk. Total time for this operation on an AS 200 4/166 was about 30 minutes (15 minutes of which is waiting for the OpenVMS CDROM to load.) Beats the hell out of Microsoft's "supported" recovery method for a system disk. When the OS comes up on the new disk it will work just fine, so long as the boot partition is still C, and the system partition is still D (see below). If the new disk was bigger than the old, disk administrator will show some unused space on the end of the disk. In my case, 9 Mb was wasted out of 1Gb. The only tape unit I had free to move to the NT system was an Exabyte 8205, and unfortunately, the VMS boot CDROM didn't know what to do with it, so I couldn't try saving/restoring from tape. Now, a word of warning. Here is what I did next: dka300->dka0: (external to internal) remove external drive, reboot VMS CD room dka0-> dka100: (internal to internal) Boot NT off dka100. Then, even though NT was RUNNING off disk 1, it assigned drive C to disk 0, and E to the one it was running on. This was not good. When I tried to "thin out" the OS partition E, by, for instance, telling it to remove FX!32, it actually removed most of the FX!32 pieces from drive C (disk 0). I think that this is likely to be a general problem. Take home lesson - this boot VMS CD method can be used to duplicate disks. But after doing so, only one such disk should remain in the system. Is this method legal? Maybe not, but since the CD never gets to the part where it asks for a license... In any case, I don't expect that Digital, er, Compaq, will begin marketing OpenVMS boot CDs as an image backup solution for NT. Regards, David Mathog mathog@seqaxp.bio.caltech.edu Manager, sequence analysis facility, biology division, Caltech ************************************************************************** * Affordable VMS? See: http://seqaxp.bio.caltech.edu/www/pcvms.html * **************************************************************************