Hello,

I hope someone takes pity and helps me out with my situation.
I recently attempted to use sysinst to upgrade my 1.4/i386 
system to 1.4.1 and I was miserably unsucessful. Perhaps 
someone reading this can clue me into what I may have done 
wrong.

First, I created a the 1.4.1 boot floppy, and moved the new
file sets to a directory I created, called /usr/distrib 
(my /usr file system is located on wd0g). I booted from 
the floppy, selected option 'b' from the menu to begin 
an upgrade. I then confirmed that I wanted to do the 
upgrade. sysinst told me it detected wd0 and wd1, and I 
told sysinst to use wd0. sysinst then ran fsck for all ffs 
file systems defined in my fstab file. during this process 
sysinst told me it could not process file system wd2h and 
aborted. I then remembered that when I attempted to upgrade 
from 1.3.3 to 1.4 I had this same problem (sysinst knows it 
will only work with wd0 and wd1, but it still insists on 
trying to mount the file system I had defined on wd2h). I 
then commented out my file system on wd2h in fstab and 
began the upgrade process again. This time the fsck 
operations completed successfully, installboot installed
the biosboot.sym file. When I got to the section where I
am prompted to select the location of the files I selected
the option for an unmounted file system. Following what
is in the installation notes for the i386 port (item 14,
entitled, "Installation from an unmounted filesystem"), 
I specified wd0g for the device, ffs for the filesystem,
and distrib as the directory. When I tried to continue
with these settings it failed and I saw the message:
"distrib could not be mounted on local device wd0g"

I tried variations of the directory (/distrib, distrib/,
/distrib/, etc..), but to no avail. Then, I decided that
maybe I could get this to succeed if I manually mount 
the file system and then instead of doing an upgrade
from an unmounted file system I could do one from a local
directory. I exited sysinst, mounted the wd0g file system
on /mnt3 (which I created) and started sysinst again. 
Again I tried to do an upgrade, and when I got to the 
point of the fsck, fsck was run on wd0g while it was 
mounted! I then was prompted with a message to mark 
the file system as clean, and sysinst aborted after that.

Frustrated with not being able to use the NetBSD sysinst
program to do the upgrade I then rebooted into 1.4 and 
performed the upgrade manually.

Has anyone been able to successfully upgrade a 1.4
system? If so, I would really like to know how you did
it. At this point, I am *very* frustrated using the sysinst
utility to upgrade. When 1.4 was released I was one of the 
unlucky ones that got bit by the bug in sysinst that caused
it to coredump and that incident forced me to completely 
re-install NetBSD from scratch. I'm glad sysinst hasn't 
coredumped on me -- I just wish it would allow me to 
upgrade my system.

Regards,

Brian
bstark@uswest.net