Has anyone cloned a Mitel controller to a new hard drive and booted the new drive sucessfully?

[EYES]

I have an older Mitel 3300 controller running level 6.x with a questionable 40 Gig IDE drive in it. Has anyone been successful at cloning a fully configured Mitel hard drive to a new drive and then getting it to boot?

 

[wireman50]

Why clone what could be questionable data?

Use the fixdata parameter at boot (partitions new drive), reload 6 and then a backup.

 

[EYES]

This was newly reloaded Mitel 3300 on a old disk drive, witch has had the database restored everything is working fine at the moment but I don't know if the drive can be trusted. To avoid a lengthy reload all over again I had hoped I could simply do a disk to disk clone.

 

[wireman50]

The only issue I can see (and I could be wrong)is the partition as that has to be done the Mitel way....

 

[EYES]

Does Mitel run on top of a Linux based operating system?

 

[sarond]

Partitions are actually FAT32 I believe.
I'm sure I had tested this with a SATA drive and it worked. I can't remember what program I used to do the cloning though.
The only thing you might have to do is make sure the correct partition boots.

The best way as wireman says is to format the drive using the Mitel controller with the 'FixPartition' option.

 

[EYES]

Thanks everyone I am going to give it a try.

 

[Lundah]

I like CloneZilla for a tool to copy drives, but I've never tried it with a 3300 drive. Just be prepared to rebuild & restore the drive the recommended way in case your disk-to-disk goes south.

 

[EYES]

I decided not to try it with this particular system it is a working customer's system, especially with it being a Monday for exactly the same reason you gave above. I am going to try it with a bench system first, I have this Easeus Todo commercial backup program which I have successfully cloned Linux with in the past so we'll see. It would be so nice to have a backup hard drive ready to go - only needing a data restore when a system goes down.

 

[Lundah]

I pre-load drives with the latest software load all the time, then all I need to do is license them and restore from the backup. I use a lab controller to load the drives using the manual software installation procedure from a laptop running FileZilla sever and the last few MCD releases on it, each tied to a different login (mcd4, mcd5, mcd6, mcd6ur3, etc...)

 

[EYES]

You're all over it I see great suggestion!

 

[wireman50]

Its VX works BTW, not linux.

 

[EYES]

I found that out after my post and just figured if I can clone Linux which is tricky then cloning VX Works should be possible as well.

 

[LoopyLou]

Right but there would be tools written for Linux to do cloning. Less likely that those tools would be writen for VXWorks or that they would be easy to get. However since at one time Mitel put out drives with software already on them, then I would expect that is how they did it. Can't see them loading the software one at a time.

An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Anyone else and you need to throw it harder.

 

[EYES]

Good logic, I can't imagine Mitel shipping controllers that have been painstakingly loaded one at a time. There is quite a bit of information about Linux cloning procedures although I did clone Linux (Fedora) with a free version of Easeus Todo a few years back using identical hard disks. From what I'm getting VxWorks is similar to Unix or considered a hack of it but is designed as a real time only OS. Non of my research has anyone clearly saying what type of operating system is underneath it but keeps referring to the "kernel" which makes me think of Unix or Linux origins.

 

[wireman50]

I would imagine that Mitel would write their own tools for cloning the discs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VxWorks

 

[LoopyLou]

Can't see that more likely something commercial. Sector by sector copying or some such. Anyway its not really the point of the question just my quiet mussings on a sunny afternoon.

An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Anyone else and you need to throw it harder.