Upgrading Metadevices and Volumes

To upgrade or install an archive on a new boot environment, the device must be a physical slice. If you have a boot environment that has a file system that is mounted either on a Solaris Volume Manager metadevice or a Veritas file system (VxFS) volume, the upgrade or installation of an archive fails. To upgrade or install an archive on such a boot environment, you must manually change the boot environment so that all slices are physical disk slices. You could use the lucreate command to create another boot environment or you could break the metadevices or volumes.

To use the lucreate command to make a copy of the boot environment, you would place the boot environment copy on physical disk slices. For example, suppose your current boot environment's disk configuration contains the following volumes and slices.

You could then use the following lucreate command to copy the boot environment on physical disk slices. The boot environment could then be upgraded or be installed with an archive. In this example, the current boot environment is named currentBE, and the new boot environment is named nextBE.

# lucreate -s currentBE -n nextBE -m /:/dev/dsk/c0t4d0s0:ufs \
-m /usr:/dev/dsk/c0t4d0s3:ufs -m /var:/dev/dsk/c0t4d0s4:ufs

You would then be able to upgrade or install a archive on the new boot environment, activate it, and then re-mirror or encapsulate it manually.

If you choose to manually break the metadevice or volume, you would need to do the following:

• Manually mount the boot environment

• Edit the /etc/vfstab file to change all metadevices or volumes to physical disk slices

• Use the Solaris Volume Manager or Veritas software to tear down the metadevices or volumes

• Unmount the boot environment