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Date:      Fri, 12 May 2000 16:28:15 +0930
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
To:        Rudy <rudy@monkeybrains.net>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: What is the easiest way to convert an old computer?
Message-ID:  <20000512162814.Q12497@freebie.lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0005112304540.69022-100000@po.monkeybrains.net>
References:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0005112304540.69022-100000@po.monkeybrains.net>

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On Thursday, 11 May 2000 at 23:11:34 -0700, Rudy wrote:
>
> I have some old 486's and Pentiums laying around.  I'd like to put FreeBSD
> on them, but would rather not wait two days for them to run a 'make
> world'.
>
> I would like to take out the hard drives and configure them in a faster,
> existing FreeBSD box, and then place the drives back in a slower
> machine.  Can I just copy the / and /usr directorys from one disk to
> another and expect them to work? 

Almost.

> Is there a web page which outlines this process?

No, this is deep magic.

The only other thing you need to do is to put a valid bootstrap on the
disk.  Do that with disklabel -B.  Possibly /stand/sysinstall will
work as well, but I haven't tried that.  Make sure that the kernel you
put on the drive will run on the target machine.  This is normally the
case, but if, for example, you have removed the support for 486
machines from your current kernel, you can't expect it to run on a
486.

Greg
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