Solaris Bare-Metal Recovery from a Specialized CD and Your Enterprise Backup Solution

The bane of all system administrators is the crashing of a mission critical system. Further depression sets in when the crash has caused the boot disk to become corrupted and no longer possess the ability to boot the system. A crashed mission critical system requires immediate attention. Literally, every moment of downtime equates to lost revenue. The desire is to get the mission critical system back to its normal functioning state in the quickest amount of time. The rebuilding of a computer system that has lost its capability to boot is known as a bare-metal recovery. The system will need to be built starting from a bare disk drive up to a bootable and functioning operating system. Not until the release of Solaris 8 did the Solaris operating system contain a utility for providing bare-metal recovery functionality. Such functionality can be found in the operating system of other UNIX variants, such as IBM AIX, HP HP-UX, and Linux. However, by making use of the following Solaris utilities: ufsdump, ufsrestore, dd, cpio, tar, format, prtvtoc, fmthard, installboot, and JumpStart, bare-metal recovery can be achieved. Furthermore, it can be achieved by using a custom-built bootable CD-ROM (or DVD-ROM) and your environment’s networked enterprise backup solution, such as Legato NetWorker and Veritas NetBackup.