Preparing For a Disaster

1.Add or remove hardware from your computer.

2.Change firmware or update device drivers.

3.Change your disk drive configuration (e.g., modify volumes or partitions).

You should create new bootable media in any of the above cases.

Restoring to dissimilar hardware

When performing disaster recovery, the hardware on the target system must be nearly identical to the source system with the following exceptions:

•You may change your video adapter as long as the new video adapter is VGA compatible.

•You may increase the size of your hard disk.

•Your SCSI, ATAPI, Fibre Channel or USB tape drive and adapter must be the same or use the same driver as it did when the disaster recovery media was created.

•Your SCSI, IDE, Fibre Channel or USB tape drive and adapter must be the same or use the same driver as it did when the disaster recovery media was created.

•You may change network cards, USB ports and USB peripherals, except tape drives, without restriction.

•You may not perform disaster recovery to a USB hard drive or to Fibre Channel devices.

Disaster recovery allows device drivers to be added during a recovery in the event that hardware changes require additional drivers. Changing processors, motherboards, or other hardware components, will not prevent disaster recovery from working.

The Advantage of Bootable Backup Devices

Certain devices, bootable backup devices, allow you to create bootable media at backup time. The boot image is written directly to the beginning of the backup media, prepending the backed up data. Disaster Recovery with bootable media created this way is simplified because the backup media provides the boot image of the machine being recovered and the data, which is restored when the machine is booted with it.

If you create a backup to a bootable backup device that supports bootable media, as long as your backup is written from the beginning of the media, the media will be bootable and can be used for Bare-Metal Disaster Recovery.

Bootable backup devices that support bootable media and bare-metal recovery include:

•tape drives that support HP One-Button Disaster Recovery technology (see description below) and

•removable cartridge disk drives.

Removable cartridge disk drives support the creation of bootable media with both the boot image and the backed up data, as do tape drives with One-Button Disaster Recovery (OBDR). OBDR is a firmware feature which enables a tape drive to act as a bootable CD-ROM in Disaster Recovery mode. When you create a backup on an OBDR tape drive to new media, or select the Write Mode Overwrite all media (on the backup job’s configuration settings page), Data Protector Express automatically makes the media bootable. When you run One-Button Disaster Recovery, your tape drive goes into a special Disaster Recovery mode that enables it to restore your operating system, reboot from the most recent backup cartridge, and restore the backup data from the media.

To prepare for a disaster, perform the following steps:

1.Run a backup of your system, configured as described in “Configuring Backups to Support Disaster Recovery”, and save boot images to the catalog.

66 Disaster Recovery