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Chrisinfl
15 pts.
 Replace all drives in 520
AS/400 backup, AS/400 upgrading, i5 520, iSeries backup and recovery
Hello. I will need to replace all 6 drives on a 520 with 6 larger drives. There is no expansion tower, so every slot is full. What is the easiest, quickest way to accomplish this? Thanks!

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ASKED: October 29, 2008  6:58 PM
UPDATED: November 7, 2008  4:32 PM
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The easiest and quickest way is to simply perform an OPTION 21 full save and then relpace the disk drives, configure RAID or Mirroring and add them into the system ASP and then IPL from D mode, which is your tape drive that you performed the backup on which must be your alternate IPL device and then load back everything from tape including the LIC, i5OS, IBM licensed programs and your user libraries, DLO and IFS. On a machine with 6 disk drives, that shouldn't take more then 8 hours to accomplish given the speed of the tape drive. The backup and restore instructions are in the Backup and Recovery Guide for your version of i5OS. The other option is to replace a few disk drives at a time depending on available disk space because you need to first remove the drives which means the system has to move the data onto the remaining disks. Then replace a few at a time. This is the long method but without a complete reload the only other way. Good luck Lovemyi
Last Wiki Answer Submitted:  October 31, 2008  3:21 pm  by  Lovemyi   2,310 pts.
All Answer Wiki Contributors:  Lovemyi   2,310 pts.
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Opt 21 save and restore is the only way to go.
I’ve done this scenario on a Dev box.
Make sure you follow the steps to a ‘T’ because I found that I had to restore permissions again after I finished because some critical permissions were missed.

The problem with the second choice of swapping drives is that one drive is assigned as the load source.
That disk isn’t easy to swap. You would want to check with IBM about that. This option has no downtime potentially but it will take days to finish.

slack400
 2,680 pts.
 

Thanks for the replies. Initially I liked the swap 1 and wait method. I think we have lots of time because this box will be out of production. If I IPL to to tape, is it pretty automatic from there? I have never IPLed to any device other than OPT01 for an OS upgrade.
CB

Chrisinfl
 15 pts.
 

IPL to media isn’t scary at all.

It’s like booting a PC to ghost.

You will need your CD’s that you loaded your system with.
The server will load up a portion of the firmware and drives.
Without it you won’t see your tape drive.

Just get the Backup recovery manual from the IBM website and read the section on restoring your system from Opt 21.
It’s all there.

slack400
 2,680 pts.