Date: Wed, 29 May 2002 17:25:59 +1200 From: Matthew Luckie <kluckie@ihug.co.nz> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: using alternative root file systems Message-ID: <3CF46667.3080502@ihug.co.nz>
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Hi I have 120 machines, with identical file system layouts, none of which I have physical access to, that need to be upgraded from FreeBSD 3.0 to FreeBSD 4.6 I have prepared replacement usr and root file systems with vn(4) that can be dd'd over the current file systems. I am hesitant to do a dd over live filesystems, and expect that this would actually result in corrupt file systems. One idea was to prepare a self contained root file system put it in swap, boot that, and then dd in fresh usr and root file systems. As far as I understand by reading boot(8) is The partition letter inside the BSD portion of the disk. See disklabel(8). By convention, only partition `a' con- tains a bootable image. If sliced disks are used (``fdisk partitions''), any slice can be booted from, with the default being the active slice or, otherwise, the first FreeBSD slice. Is there any way I can use the swap partition as a root file system? /sbin/disklabel -r /dev/wd0s1 [...] # size offset fstype [fsize bsize bps/cpg] a: 65536 0 4.2BSD 1024 8192 16 # (Cyl. 0 - 4*) b: 281280 65536 swap # (Cyl. 4*- 21*) c: 12692736 0 unused 0 0 # (Cyl. 0 - 790*) e: 61440 346816 4.2BSD 1024 8192 16 # (Cyl. 21*- 25*) f: 12284480 408256 4.2BSD 1024 8192 16 # (Cyl. 25*- 790*) my current plan is to unpack a tar into root that is a self contained file system and boot that, then dd the usr file system across the network. Comments? -- Matthew Luckie kluckie@ihug.co.nz To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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