Upgrade from 32-bit to AMD-64?

[Pete French]

> Sure, it's possible, given sufficient toolchain knowledge, time, and  
> skills, but it's not a sensible thing to do aside from experimentation  
> and learning purposes.

Theres an intermediate method between upgrading in place and doing
a full re-install which si what I used when I did this.

1) Install amd64 onto a completely separate bootable drive (USB will
do). On that one do a 'make buildworld', 'make buildkernel'.

2) Take down the machine you mant to upgrade - boot it off the USB
drive. When booted off the USb drive mount the orignal '/' somewhere.

3) Do a 'make installkernel' and 'make installworld' with DESTDIR=/oldslah
to install the 64 bit OS onto the old drive. I also rewrote the boot
sectors on the old slash drive too.

4) Reboot - it should come up amd64 with the old config fine.

I have done this a couple of time to convert from 32 to 64 bit
installs. The beauty is that it preserves the config. I would note,
however, that in my case I did de-install all the packages and re-installed
them afterwards, so I was then running full 64 bit.

but it works, and the machine is only down for a few minutes.

-pete.