QNX System Backup

I work on system called (DANTAS) which works on QNX 4.25 OS.
It installed on new server and i need to make a backup image or something like GHOST Image in Windows OS so i can make a backup Hard Disk.
So Please help me in that issue knowing that i have less information about QNX system. :unamused:

If you have disks with the same geometry (logically at least) then you can make a sector by sector copy. The only catch is with potentially bad sectors on the target where you have good ones on the source. With modern hard disks this is pretty much impossible.

A more flexible route is to archive all the files on the disk. This can be tricky as Iā€™ve found pax does not want to copy /.boot and /.altboot. Instead Iā€™ve had to first copy /.boot to some alternate name, eg. /dot.boot and during restore copy the files back. Another important issue has to do with licenses. If you have the later style license, they are just copied along in the /.licenses file. If you have the older licenses that are stored in ā€œtrickyā€ files in the /etc/licenses directory you will need to find a different strategy. Donā€™t try to just copy these files, the copy will be incomplete. I can give you more information directly about this if you need it.

If you make an archive of the whole disk, you can compress it, and with luck it will fit on a CD or writable DVD. Otherwise a Hard drive will be needed. QNX wonā€™t burn the CD for you, but you can transfer the file to a Windows system and burn it there. Restoration would require some bootable version of QNX, eg. floppy or CD, and enough utilities to expand the archive onto the new target disk.

I gave step by step instructions back in '06 here:
openqnx.com/PNphpBB2-viewtopic-t8637-.html

But I think I did a better job in '07:
openqnx.com/PNphpBB2-viewtopic-t9005-.html

-James Ingraham
Sage Automation, Inc.

How can one test the drive for bad sectors then? Why donā€™t new disks report errors? I remember that old disks always spilled out errors into the kernel log etcā€¦ when read, write or some sectors failed. Turning that warnings off is just nonsense. (Dedicated to a well known hd manufacturer which happens to be the one who built my last broken harddisk which actually died without ever complaining about anythingā€¦)

With either QNX 2 or QNX 4 you can use the dcheck utility. This will alert you to sectors that canā€™t be read. Sometimes a sector can be read, but because it is marginal, writing to it will fail.

The reason new disks donā€™t report any bad sectors is that internally they will reorganize them when possible. I believe the way this works is that when you write to a sector, the drive will check to make sure the data was written properly. If not, it will write the information to another sector and using internal tables re-number the sectors. This can cause some slow down due to seeking to a re-numbered sector but should usually be rare.

If your drive showed no warnings before dying it was most likely a controller failure having nothing to do with the media. It might also have been a head crash, which again has little to do with the media itself. Such a drive can be recovered. Thereā€™s now a small industry that will do this in the $300-$500 range if your data is that valuable.