Re: updating to 5.0.2

["David Lord" <netbsd%lordynet.org@localhost>]

On 23 Apr 2010 at 17:08, Steve Blinkhorn wrote:

> I have been trying to upgrade one of my NetBSD boxes from 4.0 to
> 5.0.2.  I am suspicious that previous upgrades accomplished by simply
> unpacking sets manually and not taking advantage of the things sysinst
> does in a prescripted fashion may have meant that they have not been
> achieved completely.
> 
> So I made a DVD-ROM, put it in the drive, it whirred for a good long
> while, the light went on, the screen said Booting from CDROM: and then
> it booted 4.0 from the hard drive in the ordinary way.   After much
> wrestling with the BIOS, I decided to give up and try a different
> tack.  So I followed wiki instructions and put everything on a USB
> memory stick - how convenient.   Once I'd worked out how to persuade
> the BIOS tho accept it as a disk, I pressed the big red button and
> watched the LED on the stick flicker away, and hey presto! a 5.0.2
> kernel booted, but them issued a prompt asking where to find init.
> Even with boot -s it wants to know where init is.   I have no idea
> whether it is safe to run a 5.0.2 kernel when everything else is 4.0

You should be able to copy a 5.0.2 kernel and it should
be safe to boot from that. You can then mount cd or copy
files from cd and use sysinst to update pointing sysinst 
to your selected path.

You might want to think first about your filsystem if still
using ffsv1+softdeps but that requires a backup and restore
unless someone has a better method of update to WAPBL.

I've found bootable cd method most reliable for update
and made a hash of it when I tried using sysinst from 
files copied to hdd. Seems I rescued it ok by manual
extraction of the files and using etcmanage from pkgsrc.


David

> It's also very unclear to me whether I should be updating boot blocks
> - indeed I don't know how to find out which previous versions of boot
> blocks are compatible with which kernels.   I know none of this is
> difficult in principle, but there are lots of untidy details that are
> not taken care of in the documentation, and it's awkward trying to
> keep up a mental model of the process when upgrades are a relatively
> infrequent pastime.
> 
> Given that I have several NetBSD systems at different revision levels,
> I would really like to know whether I need to get sysinst going to
> automate things for me, and if so how to invoke it.   When I
> have raised questions about upgrading in the past I have had
> several useful replies, not all mutually consistent and no one
> of them complete.   I have been so happy with NetBSD since my forced
> migration from BSD/OS that I hesitate to raise this niggle, but it is
> most frustating
> 
> -- 
> Steve Blinkhorn <steve%prd.co.uk@localhost>
>