Hi, I recently decided to upgrade my network firewall which is headless. Last time I had a monitor attached I had set the BIOS to boot only CD-ROM and then hard-disk. This presented me with a problem to perform a serial-console installation. (The handbook talks about modifiy the boot floppies to use the console, this isn't so easy with a d/led ISO image)
After much mucking around I finally worked out how to perform a binary upgrade without resorting to either a floppy or cd to boot. My instructions follow in case they are of use to anyone else. rgds/mark Instructions for Upgrade Install without floppy / cdrom ------------------------------------------------------- The prerequisite is a working system (or at least boot blocks and existing ffs partitions). The first step is to unpack the normal installation images and copy the contents onto a subdirectory of your root partition. # cd / # mkdir installroot # cd installroot # vnconfig vn0c /cdrom/floppies/boot.flp # mount /dev/vn0c /mnt # cp -r /mnt/* /installroot Aftere this procedure there is an /installroot directory on your root partition with all the files needed to bootstrap the installation. Now reboot the computer and press space to enter the loader. Once you get the bootloader prompt then enter the following. ok load /installroot/kernel ok load -t mfs_root /installroot/mfsroot ok set vfs.root.mountfrom="ufs:/dev/md0c" ok boot Now the new kernel and mfs image should boot and the install start as per normal. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
