I am asking the list because documentation on this process seems to be inconsistant or light in nature on the NOW website.

Background: When we setup our Filer, vol0 spanned 24 data disks and contained "etc". The original filer, an F820, booted from this. We've since upgraded to FAS940 and Data ONTAP 7.0 and I want to migrate root to a flexvol. We also have a new disk shelf, so I set it up as aggr0 and already have some production flexvols running from it for data. I created a flexvol named root on aggr0. I want to move the root from vol0 to this new flexvol so I can destroy vol0 (which is larger now and has no remaining production qtrees) and create a second aggregate with the 3 disk shelves that would be freed.

Problem: Several articles, such as Solution ID: kb5856 make it sound like you need to copy etc into /aggr0/newvol instead of /vol/newvol. It also demonstrates that the newly created /vol/newvol appears empty after this. Why would you do it that way? Is it an ndmpcopy/rootvol thing that you would want to do this? I have successfully migrated normal data from traditional volumes to flex volumes using various combinations of ndmpcopy, tar, and rsync. Copies that complete successfully work fine.

Other articles such as Solution ID: kb5634 make the procedure sound simpler yet more vague: "1. From an Admin host that has access to both traditional vol0 and the new root volume copy the entire /etc directory over to the new volume. " This I can easily handle, but I want to be fairly certain that it will actually boot from the new root vol after doing "vol options root root".

I also want to put boot files on the new aggr/root disks so I can boot from that shelf incase I need to replace my compactflash card. Would 'download' do the right thing and place the boot files on the new disk shelf as long as I have set "vol options root root"?

Has anyone done something similar, and how large did you make your new root volume? NetApp webpages have widely varying examples varying from 14g to recommendations of 30g or 90g. Our /etc is only 0.25 gigs and I wouldn't expect coredumps to consume more disk space than the filer has memory, and if my filer decides to start coredumping frequently then I will be thinking about the disk space and expanding it, since I can.