Recovering an unusable system

If your system will not boot, your system software is corrupted beyond repair, or your hard disk has been reformatted or replaced, you can use your emergency recovery boot media, tapes, and incremental backups to restore your system.

Before attempting to restore the system, ensure that your motherboard, hard disks, memory, and peripherals are in good working order. Do so by running any hardware diagnostics included with your system by the manufacturer. While this recovery procedure restores all the system software, applications, and data on the recovery media to your hard disk, it does not ensure proper operation of the system hardware.

To recover the system:

1. Boot the system using the emergency recovery boot media (diskettes or CD). Enter your licensing information when prompted.

2. Correct the system damage or restore data from the emergency recovery tapes.

   The emergency recovery main menu provides options to start a limited UnixWare 7 operating system command-line shell, to restore data from emergency recovery tapes, to mount or unmount all filesystems (if UnixWare 7 data is accessible on the hard disk), and to reboot the system.

3. Use the up or down arrow keys or the <Tab> key to select the desired choice and then press <Enter>.

   • If you select to invoke an emergency shell, a shell prompt is displayed and the following commands are available:

     cat(1)	chroot(1M)	cpio(1)	date(1)
     dd(1M)	echo(1)	edvtoc(1M)	fdisk(1M)
     find(1)	fsck(1M)	grep(1)	ksh(1)
     labelit(1M)	ln(1)	ls(1)	mkdir(1)
     mkfs(1)	mount(1M)	prtvtoc(1M)	rm(1)
     stty(1)	vi(1)

     Use these commands to investigate and fix the problem. To exit the shell and return to the main menu, press <Esc>.

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     NOTE: Some of these commands (for example, the find command) are limited-function shell aliases for the regular UnixWare 7 commands. If the hard disk is functional and mounted, you can execute the full-function commands from the hard disk by specifying the full path of the command (for example, /mnt/usr/bin/find).

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   • If you select to reinstall your system, insert the emergency recovery tapes when prompted. Wait for the processing of the last tape to complete before going to the next step.

   • If you select to mount filesystems, the UnixWare 7 filesystems are mounted. If you then invoke the emergency shell, you can access all the UnixWare 7 commands on your system. If your hard disk is severely damaged, this option may not be available.

   • If you select to unmount filesystems, the UnixWare 7 filesystems are unmounted. If your hard disk is severely damaged, this option may not be available.

   • You can choose to reboot your system. If you used the emergency recovery shell to repair your system, remove the emergency recovery boot media from the drive before selecting the option to reboot your system.

4. Remove the emergency recovery boot media. If you restored the system from the emergency recovery tapes, you can remove the last tape from the tape drive at this time.

5. Press <Esc> to reboot your system.

   You may notice error messages similar to the following:

   UX: initprivs: WARNING: File ``file'' fails validation: entry ignored
   UX: initprivs: WARNING: X entries ignored in ``/etc/security/tcb/privs''
   

   This is because the date stamp for the inode was changed during the restore process.

   You can fix these errors after your system boots into multi-user mode, by logging in as root and entering the following command:
   
   /etc/security/tools/setpriv -x

6. If you created any full or incremental backups of your system after creating the emergency recovery tapes, restore those backups using the restore method corresponding to the backup method you used to create them.

   For example, if you created backups using the cpio(1) command, use the same method to restore the archive.