Re: 5.2 is dangerous to drive

On Mon, Mar 15, 2004 at 10:57:52AM -0600, Wayne Barnes wrote:
> Dear Level 5ers,
> 
>    I got a 5.2.1 CD in the mail, so I thought I should upgrade
> from my older 5.0-CURRENT which had been working very well
> for months.
> 
>    Big mistake.
> 
>    I started sysinstall from my perfectly good system running
> 5.0, and it duly overwrote the binaries with 5.2 stuff, but on reboot,
> the device probes hung up at:
> Timecounters 10.000 msec increment   (or something very similar)
> 
> This line is right before the probe of the hard drives ad0 and ad1,
> but no amount of waiting would allow things to boot farther.
> 
>    I found that the 5.2.1 CD and a 5.2 CD would hang at the same place.
> 
>    I retreated to a 5.1 miniinst CD, and that worked (I had to
> ignominiously prepare the latter CDs by plugging an XP box to
> my DSL.)
> 
>    I still could not install the 5.1 system over the old system,
> as I got panic page faults, which caused a reboot after a few
> "chunks" were copied from the CD.
> 
>    I have had to open up a new drive and install 5.1 onto that.
> I cannot access all partitions on the old hosed drive.
> I can not access slice a, the presumptive / directory, which
> will not mount.  The other slices mount fine, thankfully,
> and the aborted upgrade had saved /etc to /var, so I think
> I have all the data I need to rebuild my system.
> 
>    My hardware is unremarkable ASUS motherboard, AMD processor
> and Western Digital hard drives.  If someone wants more
> precise specs, I can prepare them.
> 
>    I strongly suggest that sysinstall never be run from the old, live
> system on a new CD.  Let the CD try to boot up first, as a presumably safe
> test to see if it has this problem of not being able to probe the hard
> drive(s).

The docs associated with 'update' via sysinstall on the CD-ROMS say
this very thing...

More specifically, when you run 'sysinstall', there is a 'Docs' menu.  In
there, is an 'Install' does, which also covers upgrades:

  3 Upgrading FreeBSD 

  Important: These notes assume that you are using the version of
  sysinstall(8) supplied with the version of FreeBSD to which you
  intend to upgrade. Using a mismatched version of sysinstall(8)
  is almost guaranteed to cause problems and has been known to leave
  systems in an unusable state. The most commonly made mistake in
  this regard is the use of an old copy of sysinstall(8) from an
  existing installation to upgrade to a newer version of FreeBSD.
  This is not recommended.

-- 
Brian Reichert				<reichert_at_numachi.com>
37 Crystal Ave. #303			Daytime number: (603) 434-6842
Derry NH 03038-1713 USA			BSD admin/developer at large