Re: upgrading an old system

[steve%prd.co.uk@localhost (Steve Blinkhorn)]

Very gratefule for all the good advice.    Here's the story so far.
First of all, I was able to boot a 7.0 kernel with no difficulty - and
in the process discovered that there have been 2 CPUs all along.   But
the disk layout is sorely in need of revision.   So I have tried
everything I can find: in summary, cutting a new install image CD
failed to producenything that worked in the CD-ROM drive.   I have a
2.02 install CD that goes into sysinst, but skips the disk layout
process and goes straight to installing sets.  Other bootable media I
have don't boot in this drive.   I do remember the days when CD-ROM
drives could be very fussy about CD-R and CD-RW media.

The 3.0 machine has a much saner disk layout - very possibly because I
configured it, whereas the 2.0 was configured by data centre staff way
back when.   So I think I can move that forwad straightforwardly.


Is the disk layout configuration tool accessible other than through
running sysinst, or will I have to bite the bullet and edit the disk
label by hand?   I think there is a sensibly sized root partition on
the 2.0 machine, so it might be possible to leave that untouched,
adjust the (insanely small) swap partition, and set up a sensible
layour for the rest of the disk while keeping a bootable root
partition.

All thoughts welcome.

--
Steve Blinkhorn <steve%prd.co.uk@localhost>
You wrote:
> 
> 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
> http://anduin.eldar.org  - & -  http://anduin.ipv6.eldar.org [IPv6 only]
> 


-- 
Steve Blinkhorn <steve%prd.co.uk@localhost>

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S F Blinkhorn MA PhD CPsychol FBPsS, Managing Director,
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