Very gratefule for all the good advice. Here's the story so far. First of all, I was able to boot a 7.0 kernel with no difficulty - and in the process discovered that there have been 2 CPUs all along. But the disk layout is sorely in need of revision. So I have tried everything I can find: in summary, cutting a new install image CD failed to producenything that worked in the CD-ROM drive. I have a 2.02 install CD that goes into sysinst, but skips the disk layout process and goes straight to installing sets. Other bootable media I have don't boot in this drive. I do remember the days when CD-ROM drives could be very fussy about CD-R and CD-RW media.
The 3.0 machine has a much saner disk layout - very possibly because I configured it, whereas the 2.0 was configured by data centre staff way back when. So I think I can move that forwad straightforwardly. Is the disk layout configuration tool accessible other than through running sysinst, or will I have to bite the bullet and edit the disk label by hand? I think there is a sensibly sized root partition on the 2.0 machine, so it might be possible to leave that untouched, adjust the (insanely small) swap partition, and set up a sensible layour for the rest of the disk while keeping a bootable root partition. All thoughts welcome. -- Steve Blinkhorn <[email protected]> You wrote: > > [email protected] (Steve Blinkhorn) writes: > > [snip] > > > While I have them here I want to upgrade them to 7.0 (i386). But one is > > 2.0, the other 3.0 at present. > > > > It looks as though they will not boot from their USB ports, the > > CD-ROM drives seem not to be DVD-compatible (and I'm not sure I can > > find any blank CD-ROM disks). They have floppy drives, but I'm not > > sure I have a working floppy drive on a working machine any more. > > [snip] > > A lot of good advise has been given. I performed an upgrade from NetBSD > 4.0_STABLE to 7.0 this year on two of my systems. Basically all I ended > up doing was building a new 7.0 kernel and booting that up. The 4.0 > boot blocks were able to deal with a 7.0 kernel without any issues. > Then I unpacked the tar ball sets onto the system and rebooting again. > Then ran postinstall and reboot again. It all worked well, except for > one thing... 7.0 does not support schedular activations and anything > compiled against the old libpthreads failed. This effected packages > from package source, so I also had to recompile everything from package > source that I needed. This was a bit unexpected, but not fatal, and I > was going to do that anyway. This is one place where the extremely good > binary compatibility that NetBSD has will probably fall over. > > Going from 2.0 or 3.0 it might be simpler to find another hard drive and > install it in the system and just reload everything onto the new drive > and swap it in. You probably can install it on another system, if > needed, but assuming that the CD-ROM is bootable everything should fit > on a CD on the target system [sans a lack of blank media...]. You > mentioned that the filesystems were doing to be resized... this will > almost certainly need to be done anyway. With the addition of /stand, > which I don't think was in 2.0 or 3.0, you may not have enough room in / > to unpack the system. I nearly ran into this with an ancient laptop > that went from 4.0_STABLE to 7.0. The size of /stand was larger and > things just barely fit. > > > > > > -- > Brad Spencer - [email protected] - KC8VKS > http://anduin.eldar.org - & - http://anduin.ipv6.eldar.org [IPv6 only] > -- Steve Blinkhorn <[email protected]> **************************************************************************** This email is for the addressee only. If you are not the addressee you should immediately delete this email from your system(s) and inform us. It may contain information that is confidential or otherwise privileged, and should not be copied or redistributed to recipients not originally specified as addressees without permission. S F Blinkhorn MA PhD CPsychol FBPsS, Managing Director, Psychometric Research & Development Ltd. PO Box 1143, St Albans, Herts, AL1 9UT, UK Registered in England No. 1909571 Registered Office: 45 Grosvenor Rd., St Albans, Herts, AL1 3AW Phone: +44 (0)1727 841455 http://www.prd.co.uk ****************************************************************************
