SAPinst step state editor

[TomCenens]

Disclaimer: the following described method is an expert tooling option that is normally used by SAP support. If you mess up your system by using this method, it is not supported as such. Check the comments for more information.

While I was working on a Suite on HANA installation on Amazon AWS, I accidently overlooked the fact that my installer was going to put my Central Instance on the Z: drive. After the installation was done, my Suite on HANA was functioning fine but the next morning, all of a sudden my Central Instance was gone . Apparently I had installed the CI on the temporary "work" drive on my Amazon instance which is cleaned out once you stop the instance ... oops.

So I had to reinstall the CI but I didn't want to go through the database load again (it was an installation based on a export). Years ago I would change the xml files to achieve the wanted effect to skip some steps but somewhere along the road I learned about the step state editor option that exists for SAPinst. While I knew it exists I didn't remember what the correct parameter was again or how it functions even. A result of spending a lot of time on SAP Solution Manager? Most likely .

Where do you search for something where you only vaguely know what you are searching for? The most important sources you've got available to you of course. I did expect that this option would be described in SAP course TADM70 so I logged into SAP Learning Hub and tried to find relevant information in this SAP course.

The course provided me the correct information so I was able to find back the parameter and use it. To my surprise I couldn't easily find more information nor was I able to track down a screenshot of the step state editor.

The step state editor is included when you run SAPinst with parameter SAPINST_SET_STEPSTATE=true. The editor itself pops up after the SAPinst summary screen and allows you to edit the steps that will run in a graphical way . In the above example, I skipped all the steps that belong to "Create and load database" as you can see in the screenshot (the small "skip" icon is visible there) to avoid the data load which I didn't want to run anymore.

The actual run then just skips the steps marked for "skipping" and continues with the steps that come after these skipped steps. By using this solution I was able to skip the data load after accidently erasing my CI and reinstalling my CI in a fast way.

I did have to select some options like "remove schema from HANA db" to be able to go through the input screens first, knowing this step would not happen since I would leave it out.

Relevant information:

SAP Learning Hub

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