SUMMARY: Upgrading from 2.3 to 2.4

From: Sean Ward (seanw@amgen.com)
Date: Fri Feb 24 1995 - 09:05:34 CST


Managers,

I had posted to this group about a problem I had trying to upgrade my
machine from 2.3 to 2.4 (original post at the end).

Most of the replies were to make sure that any symbolic links in /var/sadm
were relative and not absolute. That was not a problem in my case. Just
to make sure, I did boot up from the cdrom, stop the install program, and
mount / under /a and /var under /a/var to see if I found anything out of
the ordinary. It looked ok to me.

A few thought that my /var/sadm/install/contents file was corrupted.
That could be. While it was about the right size, and I could open it in a
variety of text editors, I did not scroll through the whole thing to make
sure.

A few others asked if my boot disk was other than c0t3d0. It was not.

One other said to make sure to choose the correct name service. I made sure
that I had selected NIS, as opposed to NIS+. We'll be moving to NIS+ later
this year. (A sysadmin's job is never done... :-)

Another suggestion was to run pkgchk to see if anything unusual came up,
which it didn't, at least from what I could see.

Since the contents of my boot disk had originally been in a Classic before
my SS5 arrived (long story), it was suggeted to clean up /devices, so I did
that by doing a boot -r. The result from that was a very interesting problem:
The system decided that my single SCSI controller was c1, so all the device
files under /dev/dsk and rdsk were c1t3d0s0, and so on. Then, lo and behold,
it couldn't find any other partitions to mount, including / and /usr. What
followed was a variety of error messages and a reboot, which of course didn't
fix the problem. Subsequent attempts at a reboot -r didn't fix it either, so
I decided to go ahead and do a new install, which by this time I was coming
to the conclusion that I would have to do anyway.

Thanks to:

Stuart.Little@ssu.stcssl.co.uk
watson@jaguar.kodak.com (Steve Watson {RDCS} x84756 250179
Jackie.E.Wilson@cdc.com
James.E.Coby.Jr@cdc.com (James Coby)
"Douglas L. Acker" <uunet!se01.wg2.waii.com!dla%se05>
ackee@esri.com (Ricardo Davis [ESRI-Redlands])
Susan Menig <Susan.M.Menig@Bell-Atl.Com>
"Quinlan, Grant W." <gquinlan@mmpc.ssd.lmsc.lockheed.com>
worsham@aer.com (Robert D. Worsham)
hduc@airmoon.epa.nsw.gov.au

And especially Casper Dik <casper@fwi.uva.nl> for giving me all sorts of
things to look into.

Regards,

=============================================================================
Sean Ward, Systems Dude +1-805-447-1774 voice
Amgen Inc. +1-805-499-9096 fax
Amgen Center seanw@amgen.com
Thousand Oaks, CA 91320-1789 USA ...uunet!amgen!seanw

"Hopelessly lost, but making good time..." - Letterman
=============================================================================

Original post:

I have what is potentially a very simple question, so please bear with me.

I recently received the 2.4 Hardware 11/94 CD, so I decided to upgrade my
system (SS5, 2.3, recommended patches). The problem is that I'm never
prompted for an upgrade option. I've seen numerous posts on sun-managers,
comp.unix.solaris, as well as the documentation that came with the CD,
that refer to an "upgrade option". Once I enter the required information
to complete the bootup (hostname, name service, time zone, etc...), the
next window says "Solaris 2.3 Installation - Initial". My understanding
from all the posts I've read is that before this it should ask me for this
elusive "upgrade option".

Does the system when booting up decide whether or not it is eligible for
an upgrade? If so, how does it do this? I've gone through all the steps
in the documentation on preparing for an upgrade, and my system clearly
meets all the qualifacations.
 
I've read numerous FAQ's, including sun-managers and the Solaris 2.x FAQ
maintained by Casper Dik, and I've come up empty. I've also placed a call
into Sun, but I haven't heard back from them in almost 2 weeks despite
having left several voice mails in the interim, so I'm beginning to think
the techie assigned to my call has forgetten about me.
 



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