if you had On 2013-03-19, at 13:51 , Al Zick wrote: > Hi, > > On Mar 17, 2013, at 6:57 PM, Greg Troxel wrote: > >> >> Al <[email protected]> writes: >> >>> What I would like to be able to do is do an install on either another >>> drive or on an NFS partition. Then chroot to it and then delete the >>> files that are on /, /var, and /usr and then do a clean install of >>> NetBSD. Is this possible? If it is, could someone give me a how to on >>> doing something like this? >> >> chrooting will be awkward, because once you chroot then you will be >> running the binaries from the new install, which only works if your host >> system is compatible (NetBSD, same or later, more or less). And if you >> remove files, you won't be able to run new commands. >> >> However, you don't need to chroot. If you take a new drive, and >> fdisk/disklabel it, and mount it, and then unpack the sets, and then >> install bootblocks, it should work. You didn't mention, but if you mean >> i386, then bootblocks consists of installboot for bootxx_ffsv1 >> (probably) and also /boot, plus mbr boot records. If the host is NetBSD >> you can just use installboot and cp, pointing to /usr/mdec in the new >> system. >> >> I have done something similar a number of times, basically moving a >> system from old disks to new (bigger, less aged and in theory more >> reliable) disks. So instead of unpacking sets, I have done dump/restore >> or rsync from old to new (under /mnt) and then installed bootblocks. > > I have a system that I sent new drives out to the data center not that long > ago. I did a new install of NetBSD on them, but then I decided to update to > NetBSD 6.0. In the process, I broke some things. Now the system is not very > usable. I can get another hard drive and install NetBSD on it and then send > them that drive, but someone at the data center will need to swap out the > drive again. I don't see how I could netboot this system and it is not real > easy to tell it to boot from another drive or partition, so I thought that > there might be some way to setup a root filesystem much like you do when you > netboot. Temporarily mount this partition to run make dev files, then switch > over to it, and unmount /home, /var, /usr, and finely /. Run newfs on the > old /, /var, and /usr. Mount / as /mnt, then /var as /mnt/var and /usr as > /mnt/usr. Then cd to /mnt and untar a working install that I did on a test > box that has the exact same config as this system, so that everything will be > right in /etc. Is there any way to do this? >
if the data currently on the disk in question does not matter, create a ramdisk, write it to said disk, boot off it, reinstall. this way i set up netbsd with 'some' webhosters dedicated servers. works quite well. depending on the hardware you have, you might be required to build your own kernel. - flo
