First, thank you for taking time out of your weekend to respond to
my query. It's much appreciates.
I apologize for taking so long to reply. As you can imagine, my
system has been up and down and e-mail with it.
On Saturday, 11 December 2004 at 16:26:07 -0700, Charlie Sorsby wrote:
Is the installer for freeBSD 4.5 broken?
I've long procrastinated updating to a more recent version of
freeBSD, mainly because I hate trying to get things back the way I
had them afterwards.
Consequently, I've been running 3.4 for quite a long while. Today,
I finally decided to bite the bullet and update to 4.5, the most
recent CD that I have.
That's ancient, nearly three years old. I'm almost tempted to say
after two years the installer stops working. But in any case, you
really shouldn't be installing such old software.
Well, I finally got it go go through all of install -- what that
means is still uncertain. But, for once, I took pretty thorough
notes -- it's a shame that there's no way to log all of the
intallation process. :( Yes, I understand why.
On the last pass, it hung during installation of the packages that
I'd selected on the cvsupit package. The last thing it said was
Package cvsupit-3.0 read successfully -- waiting for pkg_add(1)
...
I'd gone to bed -- it was the wee hours by then -- and
when I checked in the morning I found (using CTLALTF2)
that there was a page there titled Branch selection menu but it
was unresponsive. Don't know why that went to the F2 console
rather than the normal without so much as a See ... with F2 ...
message.
Anyways, using CTLALTF1, I returned to the main screen and,
grasping at straws, entered CTLC which took me to an
Installation interrupt box with choices to abort, restart, and
continue. Decided to see what would happen if I selected
Continue. That took me to a message box: Add of package
cvsupit-3.0 aborted, error code 1 -- Please check the debug screen
for more info. There it simply said in a box Aborting cvsup stup
per user request.
Returning to the main screen (F1), where, as I recall, the only
choice was [OK], I entered RETURN -- Oops! on modern
keyboards, it's ENTER... -- and it resumed reading and adding
packages. Anyways, it finally finished the rest of those and I
went through the various other things (add user, set root password,
etc.) After that, a User Confirmation Menu asked if I wanted to
visit the general configuration menu to set any last options.
[NO was highlighted so I just accepted that default.
That took me back to the /stand/sysinstall Main Menu (which I
thought is what would have happened if I'd answered [YES] but
what do I know. Since I was there anyway I selected Do post-
install configuration and tried (unsuccessfully as far as I could
tell) to configure X. After that, I thought to hell with it and
decided to go quail hunting after all since it was only 09:30 and
the spot I was considering is only an hour and a half away.
Well, the list(s) of Fn keys presented by the boot manager has, not
unexpectedly, changed and I apparently selected the wrong one but I
did manage to guess right a the boot: prompt and managed to get
back to booting the disk that contains 3.4 and it still works.
At least I'd have a working system while I was away...
Well, when I got back and started experimenting again, I got it to
boot to what purported to be freeBSD 4.5 -- but by this time I'm
pretty burnt out and didn't even think to take notes so this is
from memory.
While it claimed to have booted to 4.5, the partitions that were
mounted were those containing 3.4 and those on which I still have
the stuff from 2.1.5. Put another way, while it claimed to have
booted 4.5 it *looked* as though it had booted 3.4. I have *NO*
idea what was going on. I've tried a couple of times, back and
forth but, as I said, failed to take notes. Since 3.4 is still
running (more or less normally as far as I can tell), I probably
won't get to any more experimentation until this evening or
tomorrow. I'll try to take more notes then but I may have
changed a few things by manually mounting the 4.5 partitions and
looking round.
Here's /etc/fstab from the 4.5 root partition (this is apparently
just as sysinstall created it -- I'm just now removing the extra
tab that cause excessive line length and ugly random wraps from the
following copy):
# See the fstab(5) manual page for important information on automatic mounts
# of network filesystems before modifying this file.
#
# DeviceMountpoint FStype Options DumpPass#
/dev/da0s1b noneswapsw 0 0
/dev/da0s2b noneswapsw 0 0
/dev/da1s1b noneswapsw 0 0
/dev/da2s1b noneswapsw 0 0
/dev/da3s1b noneswapsw 0 0
/dev/da3s1a / ufs rw 1 1
/dev/da2s1e /home
