Disk to disk copy

This selection allows you to recover data from an old drive when replacing it with a new drive.

The Service Aid only supports copying from a drive to another drive of similar size. This Service Aid cannot be used to update to a different size drive. The migratepv command should be used when updating drives. The Service Aid recovers all LVM software reassigned blocks. To prevent corrupted data from being copied to the new drive, the Service Aid aborts if an unrecoverable read error is detected. To help prevent possible problems with the new drive, the Service Aid aborts if the number of bad blocks being reassigned reaches a threshold.

Note: Use the migratepv command when copying the contents to other disk drive types. This command also works when copying SCSI disk drives or when copying to a different size SCSI disk drive. Refer to AIX® Version 7.1 Operating system and device management for a procedure on Migrating the contents of a physical volume.

The procedure for using this Service Aid requires that both the old and new disks be installed in or attached to the system with unique SCSI addresses. This requires that the new disk drive SCSI address must be set to an address that is not currently in use and the drive be installed in an empty location. If there are no empty locations, then one of the other drives must be removed. Once the copy is complete, only one drive may remain installed. Either remove the target drive to return to the original configuration, or perform the following procedure to complete the replacement of the old drive with the new drive.

Remove both drives.
Set the SCSI address of the new drive to the SCSI address of the old drive.
Install the new drive in the old drive's location.
Install any other drives that were removed into their original location.

To prevent problems that may occur when running this Service Aid from disk, it is suggested that this Service Aid be run from the diagnostics that are loaded from removable media when possible.