UNiBOOT is a program that creates an installable image of the root volume group which can be used to restore a system in the event of a catastrophic failure that prevents your HP-UX system from booting.

UNiBOOT creates a bootable recovery tape which is designed to restore an unbootable system with very little (actually no) human intervention! It is modeled after the AIX utility, mksysb. It requires the mkszfile command, which is included.

UNiBOOT creates a backup of the operating system's root volume group or boot disk (if not using LVM). You can use this backup (golden image) to reinstall a system to its original state after it has been corrupted. The tape is bootable and includes everything you need. The program will ask for additional tapes as necessary depending on the size of your root volume group and density of your tape drive. The tape includes the appropriate HP-UX boot image, a instl_adm configuration file, a table of contents followed by the system backup (root volume group) image.

The filesystem data is stored using the standard HP-UX program, fbackup or ORBiTs UNiBACK. Once all filesystem data is restored, UNiBOOT launches a few scripts to restore mount points and permissions, and reboots. At this point your system has been restored, as if you had just recycled power.UNiBOOT supports both the HP 9000 family servers (800s, K, T's, etc...) and workstations running HP-UX 10.x. All necessary files, boot images, and support scripts, including mkszfile, are included. We support systems with mirrored drives, as well as systems with dual-ported SCSI (or IBM SSA) disk drives, as well as systems attached to EMC and other disk arrays.

Other uses include:
Creating a Golden Image of a system which can be used for cloning an entire computer. (Changing a H50 to a K460).

• Adjusting sizes of logical volumes (such as root, primary swap, and /usr).
• Adjusting the number of physical disks in vg00.
• Changing the boot disk from a single-ended device at 52.6.0 to a FWD disk at 8.0.0
• Adding installation-abort protection when upgrading operating systems or modifying data that typically can't be "undone".
• Creating disaster-recovery tape from a single source that can be targeted to any multiple emergency servers. The disaster recovery server doesn't even have to have the same hardware device configuration.
• Changing a HFS (root) filesystem to a VxFS file system.
• You can restore individual files from a UNiBOOT tape.
• Use the disk management reports to see graphical representation of how data is physically organized on physical volumes (Release 2.0).
• Additional reports detail number if read and write I/Os by drive, I/Os by logical volume, and static system information and attributes (Release 2.0)

If you find yourself in a disaster recovery mode, the system recovery is painless. Once the hardware is repaired, simply boot to the appropriate SCSI path of your UNiBOOT tape. Absolutely no keystrokes are required. The system will completely restore, reboot, and mount all disks and devices that were available at the time the backup was created. If you wish to modify the configuration then you have a 10-second window to pre-empt the recovery once the HP-UX recovery kernel is loaded. You then have the opportunity to make any of the modifications that are ordinarily available when you do a cold installation. Instead of the standard HP-UX defaults, however, your defaults are the values associated with your configuration when the UNiBOOT tape was created.

Limitations:
The standard HP-UX installation program which UNiBOOT uses cannot install a volume group named other than vg00 - vg09. If you have non-standard volume group names, then you must rename them. UNiBOOT is not designed to back up remote (NFS mounted) file systems. UNiBOOT should be used to supplement your normal backup and recovery software and procedures. It is not a replacement for them.

Other Notes:
UNiBOOT does not fiddle with the kernel, and is designed to be installed without a reboot. The distribution includes the appropriate HP-UX boot image, UNiBOOT,mkszfile, and additional scripts. The distribution (most of that is for the HP-UX boot image) must reside on /opt/UNiBOOT.

UNiBOOT is licensed for a single host machine, but allows you to create an unlimited number of tapes for an unlimited number of target machines. When ordering, please supply us with the output from the uname -a command. This will give us all the information we need on the make and model of your Hewlett-Packard computer.