Re: upgrading an old system

[Brad Spencer <brad%anduin.eldar.org@localhost>]

steve%prd.co.uk@localhost (Steve Blinkhorn) writes:

[snip]

> While I have them here I want to upgrade them to 7.0 (i386).   But one is
> 2.0, the other 3.0 at present.
>
> It looks as though they will not boot from their USB ports, the
> CD-ROM drives seem not to be DVD-compatible (and I'm  not sure I can
> find any blank CD-ROM disks).   They have floppy drives, but I'm not
> sure I have a working floppy drive on a working machine any more.

[snip]

A lot of good advise has been given.  I performed an upgrade from NetBSD
4.0_STABLE to 7.0 this year on two of my systems.  Basically all I ended
up doing was building a new 7.0 kernel and booting that up.  The 4.0
boot blocks were able to deal with a 7.0 kernel without any issues.
Then I unpacked the tar ball sets onto the system and rebooting again.
Then ran postinstall and reboot again.  It all worked well, except for
one thing...  7.0 does not support schedular activations and anything
compiled against the old libpthreads failed.  This effected packages
from package source, so I also had to recompile everything from package
source that I needed.  This was a bit unexpected, but not fatal, and I
was going to do that anyway.  This is one place where the extremely good
binary compatibility that NetBSD has will probably fall over.

Going from 2.0 or 3.0 it might be simpler to find another hard drive and
install it in the system and just reload everything onto the new drive
and swap it in.  You probably can install it on another system, if
needed, but assuming that the CD-ROM is bootable everything should fit
on a CD on the target system [sans a lack of blank media...].  You
mentioned that the filesystems were doing to be resized...  this will
almost certainly need to be done anyway.  With the addition of /stand,
which I don't think was in 2.0 or 3.0, you may not have enough room in /
to unpack the system.  I nearly ran into this with an ancient laptop
that went from 4.0_STABLE to 7.0.  The size of /stand was larger and
things just barely fit.





-- 
Brad Spencer - brad%anduin.eldar.org@localhost - KC8VKS
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