LUCREATE syntax

First, the tutorials named above are good reads.

Second, are you establishing a boot environment on c0t0d1 or c0t1d0?  Your statement says c0t0d1 (like the disk names given to different LUNs presented form hardware RAID) but the command suggest c0t1d0.

With that said, this command:

lucreate -c first disk -m /:/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s0:ufs -n second disk

has a problem if you are using if verbatim, the names of your boot environments contain spaces.  It may be possible to do this like this:

lucreate -c "first disk" -m /:/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s0:ufs -n "second disk"

but I strongly advise against it.  Doing this means you'll have to be careful to quote the boot environment names and you have to hope the guys at Sun who wrote the LU scripts (live upgrade is partly a body of scripts that do what you could do manually; the commands are not all binaries).  I would use this command:

lucreate -c pBE -m /:/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s0:ufs -n sBE

If you have Solaris 10 05/09 and have properly sliced c0t1, this command will create an alternate boot environment on c0t1d0s0 that is a copy of the currently booted / file system.  Please note that if you have broken out /var, /opt, /usr, or others, this command alone will not necessarily be enough; you may have to copy these other file systems as well.

If you have older versions of Solaris 10, live upgrade is REALLY buggy.  You should at least patch to the latest recommended patch set before proceeding.

If you plan to boot from the alternate environment, you would use the luactivate command to boot the alternate boot environment.  

In addition, since the alternate is on a different disk, you may also have to force the system to boot from the correct disk.  On SPARC systems, this would mean specifying the correct disk and slice in openBOOT with the boot <disk name> command.  If this is an X6 server, you will likely have to change the boot order in the BIOS so that the correct disk (the one with the alternate boot environment) appears above the previous boot disk in the boot order.

The way I currently have the disks partitioned are below with c0t0d0 being the current boot disk. I had formatted the c0t1d0 disk to include the metadata slice (slice 6). I want to use the lucreate command to
establish the boot environment on the c0t1do disk so I can luactivate the c0t1d0 disk while I reformat the c0t0d0 disk to replica the c0t1d0 disk. I then will luactivate the c0t0d0 disk back to the boot disk and mirror the disks using disksuite.

Also will the lucreate command have to be run for each slice or by specifiying c0t#d#s0 cover all slices on the secondary disk.

c0t0d0 <SUN72G>
{current boot disk}

Part             Tag                Flag            Cylinders              Size                    Blocks
  0                root               wm           3221 -  4026        3.91GB    (806/0/0)        8201856
  1                swap            wu                 0 -  3220       15.63GB    (3221/0/0)      32776896
  2                backup          wm                0 - 14086       68.35GB    (14087/0/0)   143349312
  3               unassigned    wm           4027 -  5234        5.86GB    (1208/0/0)      12292608
  4               usr                 wm           5235 -  7650       11.72GB    (2416/0/0)      24585216
  5               var                 wm           7651 -  9261        7.82GB    (1611/0/0)       16393536
  6              unassigned    wm                  0                     0              (0/0/0)             0
  7              home               wm           9262 - 14086       23.41GB    (4825/0/0)   49099200


c0t1d0 <SUN72G>
{disk needing boot environment }

 Part       Tag              Flag             Cylinders         Size                 Blocks
  0          root             wm            3222 -  4027       3.91GB    (806/0/0)     8201856
  1          swap          wu                  0 -  3221      15.63GB    (3222/0/0)   32787072
  2          backup        wu                  0 - 14086     68.35GB    (14087/0/0) 143349312
  3          unassigned  wm          4028 -  5235        5.86GB    (1208/0/0)   12292608
  4          usr               wm          5236 -  7651       11.72GB    (2416/0/0)   24585216
  5          var               wm          7652 -  9263         7.82GB    (1612/0/0)   16403712
  6          unassigned  wm               0 -     2           14.91MB    (3/0/0)         30528
  7          home            wm         9264 - 14086       23.40GB    (4823/0/0)   49078848

Also as turnbulld mentioned I have the opt, var and usr filesytems broken out and mounted under their own slice under the vfstab and was wondering lucreate what commands would I have to use in addition to  "lucreate -c pBE -m /:/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s0:ufs -n sBE".

First, let me answer the direct question.  There is a larger issue though.  More below.

Ok, so the disks are c0t0d0 and c0t1d0 which is fine.  The command to copy the root from c0t0d0s0 to c0t1d0s0 is

lucreate -c pBE -m /:/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s0:ufs -n sBE

For each of the other filesystems you want to include, you would add an additional -m switch.  For example, if /usr is on slice 3, the command would become:

lucreate -c pBE -m /:/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s0:ufs -m /usr:/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s3:ufs -n sBE

Again, remember, after using luactivate, you will also have to manage which disk the server selects to boot from the BIOs or openBOOT depending on whether you have x64 or SPARC hardware.  The luactivate command does not handle this.

The larger issue is to ask why mess with moving the boot environment around at all.  I am assuming that the slice configuration on c0t1 is what you want to move to form that on c0t0.  If you ar eplanning a more radical change that is not reflected in the material you posted, just ignore the rest of this post.

It looks like the difference between the disks is extremely small (around 5MB per cylinder).  Slice 1 is one cylinder larger on c0t1 than c0t0; slice 6 is one cylinder larger on c0t1 than c0t0, and slice 7 is two cylinder's smaller on c0t1 than c0t0.  These differences don't amount to a lot of space (~10MB) and can be resolved without moving the boot environment.

To use the partitions as shown, standardize on the slice scheme for c0t0 (the existing boot disk).  You can use this command to make c0t1 look exactly like c0t0:

prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s2 | fmthard -s - /dev/rdsk/c0t1d0s2

Be warned that this will change the label and slice boundaries on c0t1 so, if you have mounted filesystems on c0t1, you need to copy that material somewhere else (tar or cpio will do nicely).  Since you are planning to mirror c0t0 to c0t1, I am assuming that c0t1 is unused at the moment.

Once this is done, mirror the disks.

Tks much for your solution and the partition scheme I want to use is on c0t1d0 as it has the metadata slice (slice 6) added. The c0t0d0 disk was partitioned without that slice and data was added to the disk. The only solution I could come up with was to format the c0t1do disk, lucreate the data from c0t0d0 to c0t1do per slice and temporarily make it the boot disk while I correctly format c0t0d0. Your response is dead on and also will I be able to perform this lucreate command while users are on the system or should I wait until after hours? Agn tks for all your assistance.