Installing 6.2 from a 5.3 mini install CD...

[Steve Bertrand]

Peter Wood wrote:
> Good Afternoon,
> 
> Does anyone have any knowledge, good or bad, about installing
> 6.2-RELEASE from a 5.3-RELEASE mini install CD?
> 
> The story is that I have a 5.3-RELEASE CD in my colo server in London
> (which I have BIOS serial support w/ terminal server), and I know in the
> installer you can specify the release name.
> 
> I've tried to do this in VMware, I did a custom install, set the release
> name to 6.2-RELEASE, installed only base. However as FreeBSD has enabled
> an option for a SMP kernel, it didn't install a kernel and thus failed
> to boot.
> 
> I was contimplating if I could install the kernel as a package or a non
> named distribution. Is there anything I can do, or do I have to send a
> CD down and hope my provider doesn't charge me to much?
> 
> This'll teach me for not buying a CD-RW when I buy a new server... "What
> will I need one of them for, it's a colo server.".

I don't know if this will help you or not, but just this morning, I had
a 5.4-PRERELEASE box that was giving me major issues (#1 being I could
not compile anything), so I did the binary upgrade from a 6.2 CD.

It only did base the first time, and subsequently did not boot.

I then booted off of the 6.2 CD, mounted the hard disk into /, then
proceeded with install. Instead of selecting 'Minimal' for
distributions, I went in and manually added the base, and the GENERIC
kernel, after that, I was up and running.

Steve