How valuable is your data? I recommend you make an offline backup. There's a lot of steps in your procedure which introduce room for error. You could perhaps disconnect one of the hard drive's data cable (same thing). Also, make a backup copy of your geom meta data somewhere.
Other than that, your procedure sounds like it should work. Though, I've never tried it. I do recall, that when updating from 6.2-RELEASE to 8-RELEASE, the geom meta data was automatically updated. I'm not sure if there is any change between Release and Stable, though. I'm also not sure if it was a backward incompatible change, as I never went back to 6.2. Just something to be aware of. Sorry I can't be more helpful. Maybe someone else knows more. -Modulok- On 3/20/10, Mike Clarke <jmc-freeb...@milibyte.co.uk> wrote: > > I'm currently running 8.0-RELEASE and am considering experimenting with > 8.0-STABLE. I'd like to preserve my existing system in case things go > pear-shaped so I'll copy the entire system onto a spare slice and then > use csup to upgrade the copy to STABLE. Normally I'd go through the > steps of bsdlabel, newfs and then dump|restore to create the copy but > I'm wondering if I can take advantage of my recently created gmirror to > cut down the work. > > I have two 500GB disks, /dev/ad4 and /dev/ad8, each partitioned into 4 > slices of 88, 88, 42 and 259GB. My system is installed on the first > slices (ad4s1 and ad8s1) which are mirrored as /dev/mirror/gm0. The > second slices (ad4s2 and ad8s2) are currently unused. My thoughts are > to temporarily add ad4s2 into gm0 with "gmirror insert gm0 ad4s2" and > wait for the mirror to synchronise. I should then be able to remove the > temporary addition with "gmirror remove gm0 /dev/ad4s2" at which point > ad4s2 should be a duplicate of the original system and I can then go > ahead and create a new mirror with "gmirror label -b load gm1 ad4s2" > and "gmirror insert gm1 ad8s2". After editing /etc/fstab in the new > mirror to use gm1 instead of gm0 I should then be able to boot into the > system on slice 2 and upgrade it to STABLE while still keeping my > original system to fall back to if required. > > Is this approach of moving disks from one mirror to another workable, or > have I missed something that would lead me into deep trouble? I don't > mind unduly if I make a mess of the second slice and have to start > again but I don't want to lose the contents of my original system on > slice 1. > > -- > Mike Clarke > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org" > _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
