From: lfahnoe@kegworks.mn.org (Larry Fahnoe)
Subject: Re: 3.0 upgrade reformatting drive
Keywords: 3.0 upgrade
Organization: The Kegworks, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Distribution: usa
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 19:04:20 GMT

In article <1992Nov10.185302.32117@iitmax.iit.edu> vonb@iitmax.iit.edu (Robert Von Borstel) writes:
>I would like to reinstall 3.0 on my internal drive in my slab.
>Hope to see some performance improvement.  I have the CDrom
>drive also attached, but can someone tell me how I can do this.
>
>Seem to recall remembering something about being able to boot off
>the cd-rom and then making the upgrade do a reformat or something
>along those lines, but I have not had any success to date.

I've just finished this sort of operation on my cube and am pleased to
report that even with a machine with old roms, all you need is some time
and patience to get the job done; the software works well.  Here are the
steps that I took to do it.

1) Backup all the files that you are interested in saving.  I've got an
   OD, so piped a level 0 dump through compress and out onto the OD for
   both file systems.

2a) (optional) Reformat the disk if you wish to do things like enabling
   cache or change sector sizes.  I've got a WREN VI, so I used
   `TheFormatter' (available on sonata) to reformat the disk.  You will
   need another disk that you can put TheFormatter on and boot from to do
   this.  TheFormatter was written for WREN VI drives, but it can
   apparently work with other disks as well.  I do not any experience with
   other disks in the NeXT environment though.

2b) (optional) Partition the disk to your taste.  While you are booted off
   an alternate disk, create the disktab for your partitioning scheme and
   then use `disk' to build the new file systems.  I suspect you could do
   this by booting single-user mode off of the 3.0 CD-ROM and then using
   `newfs', but I was not quite that brave.

3) Make sure that you do not have any devices at SCSI ID 0 as the system
   will boot off of ID 0 without regard to the unit number in a bsd(n,0,0)
   command.

4) Set the SCSI ID of the CD-ROM drive to 0 (this may not be necessary,
   but I chose to do it this way) and then read pgs 11-14 of the Release
   Notes as they explain how to boot off of the CD-ROM.  If you've set the
   ID to 0, use `bsd(0,0,0)sdmach rootdev=sd0'.  You can tack on the nbuf
   stuff if you want to experiment with more buffers, I added `nbuf=128'
   and it worked just fine.

5) You will be warned that this is an installation rather than an upgrade,
   and asked a couple of questions to make sure you really wish to do
   this, as well as questions about partition information.  You are
   encouraged to use a single partition, but when I answered `no' to the
   single partition prompt, it went ahead and used almost exactly the same
   parameters that I did when I built the file systems in step 2b.  Since
   I was just splitting the disk in half, I can't be sure that some other
   partitioning scheme would have been preserved--just saying that it
   worked for me.

6) The basic system is then installed, and you are prompted to press
   Return and reboot the system once finished.  If you've got the CD-ROM
   set to ID 0, you will need to change it to a value greater than that of
   the disk you've just built.

7) Once the new system comes up, you get to choose the language, and you
   are on your way.  Because this is a minimal installation, you must
   install the optional packages by hand; this is also documented in the
   Release Notes.

All told, with all the backups and restores to get my system back to the
way that I had it before, the operation took somewhere around 6 hours.  If
one is just doing a simple build and does not have a bunch of customized
stuff to replace, you could probably get the job done in a third of the
time that I spent.

Is it any faster?  Who knows, I've only had it running for a little while
now, but it does seem to be more efficient with regard to disk accesses
than the system was after I had run UpgradeApp.

--Larry
-- 
Larry Fahnoe                        Cellular One
612/832-7616                        7900 S. Xerxes Ave, Suite 301
lfahnoe@kegworks.mn.org             Minneapolis, MN  55431
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.sysadmin