From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Nov 24 14:38: 0 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-65-26-235-186.mmcable.com [65.26.235.186]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 0312637B4C5 for ; Fri, 24 Nov 2000 14:37:57 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 98694 invoked by uid 100); 24 Nov 2000 22:37:56 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14878.60867.961436.82467@guru.mired.org> Date: Fri, 24 Nov 2000 16:37:55 -0600 (CST) To: 01031149@3web.net Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: best upgrade path? In-Reply-To: <131222714@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.75 under 21.1 (patch 10) "Capitol Reef" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Duke Normandin <01031149@3web.net> types: > On 22 Nov 00 at 20:36, Mike Meyer wrote: > >thursday@altavista.net types: > >> Hi, > >> I have a FreeBSD 3.3-RELEASE machine which I'm considering upgrading to > >> 4.2-RELEASE. > >> I'm wondering what the best upgrade path is: whether to use the "Upgrade" > >> method provided in /stand/sysinstall, or whether to wipe out the hard > >> drive and do a completely fresh install from scratch. > >Wipe the hard drive (or at least everything fs that install is going > >to touch) and do a fresh install. The upgrade stuff is relatively > >painless, but it doesn't safe very much time. > Did you mean reformating the HDD in DOS when you wrote "wipe the hard drive" > above - or something more Unix-centric? Thanks.... Well, that would do it. I was thinking more along the lines of using the Unix newfs on the file systems. Assuming you've set things up so you have FreeBSD partitions (some combo of /, /usr, /var and maybe /usr/local) and a local content partition (call it /home) do a level 0 dump of the FreeBSD partitions, as you're about to destroy them. A printed ls of /var/db/pkg will be useful, and a level 0 of /home is probably a good idea. During the install, don't change the DOS slices or the partitions. Use the old FreeBSD partitions, and set the newfs flag so that those file system gets reformatted during the install. Just mount /home, don't newfs it. While doing the install, the ls of /var will tell you what packages you had installed so you can install current versions. If you don't have your local content on a separate partion, now is a good time to fix that.