Re: Is it possible to chroot and then install NetBSD to the boot drive

[Florian Geiges <florian%geiges.net@localhost>]

if you had 
On 2013-03-19, at 13:51 , Al Zick wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On Mar 17, 2013, at 6:57 PM, Greg Troxel wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Al <al%familysafeinternet.com@localhost> writes:
>> 
>>> What I would like to be able to do is do an install on either another
>>> drive or on an NFS partition. Then chroot to it and then delete the
>>> files that are on /, /var, and /usr and then do a clean install of
>>> NetBSD. Is this possible? If it is, could someone give me a how to on
>>> doing something like this?
>> 
>> chrooting will be awkward, because once you chroot then you will be
>> running the binaries from the new install, which only works if your host
>> system is compatible (NetBSD, same or later, more or less).  And if you
>> remove files, you won't be able to run new commands.
>> 
>> However, you don't need to chroot.  If you take a new drive, and
>> fdisk/disklabel it, and mount it, and then unpack the sets, and then
>> install bootblocks, it should work.  You didn't mention, but if you mean
>> i386, then bootblocks consists of installboot for bootxx_ffsv1
>> (probably) and also /boot, plus mbr boot records.  If the host is NetBSD
>> you can just use installboot and cp, pointing to /usr/mdec in the new
>> system.
>> 
>> I have done something similar a number of times, basically moving a
>> system from old disks to new (bigger, less aged and in theory more
>> reliable) disks.  So instead of unpacking sets, I have done dump/restore
>> or rsync from old to new (under /mnt) and then installed bootblocks.
> 
> I have a system that I sent new drives out to the data center not that long 
> ago. I did a new install of NetBSD on them, but then I decided to update to 
> NetBSD 6.0. In the process, I broke some things. Now the system is not very 
> usable. I can get another hard drive and install NetBSD on it and then send 
> them that drive, but someone at the data center will need to swap out the 
> drive again. I don't see how I could netboot this system and it is not real 
> easy to tell it to boot from another drive or partition, so I thought that 
> there might be some way to setup a root filesystem much like you do when you 
> netboot. Temporarily mount this partition to run make dev files, then switch 
> over to it, and unmount /home, /var, /usr,  and finely /. Run newfs on the 
> old /, /var, and /usr. Mount / as /mnt, then /var  as /mnt/var and /usr as 
> /mnt/usr. Then cd to /mnt and untar a working install that I did on a test 
> box that has the exact same config as this system, so that everything will be 
> right in /etc. Is there any way to do this?
> 

if the data currently on the disk in question does not matter, create a 
ramdisk, write it to said disk, boot off it, reinstall. this way i set up 
netbsd with 'some' webhosters dedicated servers.
works quite well. depending on the hardware you have, you might be required to 
build your own kernel. 


- flo