This is a summary of the email responses I received to the question
I asked in a previous article. It was suggested that I cross post this
summary to comp.unix.solaris although the original article didn't appear
there. The problem was:
>> I need help upgrading a 2.3 sparc to 2.4. A guy with a 2.3 machine
>> recently left the company and before giving his machine to someone
>> else I thought I'd upgrade it to 2.4. The upgrade fails because his
>> root file system only has 19Mb and the upgrade program says it needs
>> to have 20-21Mb. I tried to customize the installation but the only
>> stuff that is installed in the root seemed to be required (not too
>> surprising). Sun's upgrade program didn't make this easy to determine
>> so I might have missed something.
>> [stuff deleted]
Several people wrote suggesting that I take some space from
the swap partition and give it to root. The procedure suggested
by Rand Huntzinger was:
>> If you are trying to move the boundary between root and swap you need to:
>>
>> 1. Dump the root filesystem (I'd dump everything to be safe).
>> 2. Boot the CD-ROM.
>> 3. Adjust the boundary between root and swap. Be sure only to
>> affect the one boundry.
>> 4. Use newfs to build an empty filesystem on the root partition.
>> 5. Restore the root filesystem.
>> 6. Run installboot to install the boot block (otherwise the
>> system won't boot).
>> 7. Boot your system and make sure it runs.
>>
>> Once this is done, you can do the upgrade according to instructions.
Note that there was some confusion among my correspondents as to whether
the upgrade program was complaining about total space on /, free space
on /, or some combination. I couldn't tell for sure either although I
thought it was total space.
Thank you to everyone who replied!
BTW, I was going to try this over the weekend but on Friday the disk
died with hard errors and now I have to wait for a new disk to arrive
and will be doing a full install anyway. So I can't vouch for the fact
that this will work.
-- Keith Crews keith@belmont.com Belmont Research 84 Sherman St. Cambridge, Mass. 02140 617-868-6878
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:09:09 CDT