Crazy install question. (Fresh Install on Live System)

[danaeckel]

Greetings,

I currently have a FreeBSD 9.1 system that has been good to me for the past could of years. The hardware is a third generation i3, running a pair of 1TB drives in a RAID0. However I am at a point where I would like to make some changes. I would like to get a pair of 2TB drives and install version 10.1 when it comes out. Now is it possible to do a system install of version 10 while keeping version 9.1 up and running? What I would like to do is use the machine to install 10.1, run off a different subnet while I set it up, unplug the old 1TB drives then plug in the 2TB drives when I get it tested out. Is this possible?

Thanks!
Dana

 

[SirDice]

Now is it possible to do a system install of version 10 while keeping version 9.1 up and running?

Not while 9.1 is up and running.

What I would like to do is use the machine to install 10.1, run off a different subnet while I set it up, unplug the old 1TB drives then plug in the 2TB drives when I get it tested out.

Shutdown the machine, take out the 2x1 TB. Install the 2 x 2 TB and install FreeBSD 10.1. Assuming the old installation is on the two 1 TB drives you should be able to switch back when things go wrong.

 

[kpa]

You can prepare the FreeBSD 10 installation from a running 9.1 system by just extracting the distribution tarballs on the newly created filesystem but you have to know few bits and pieces that are needed for booting and getting things running properly. One of them is creating /etc/fstab correctly (assuming UFS as the root filesystem) so that the bootloader can detect the root filesystem. There are few others like setting timezone with tzsetup(8), creating aliases.db in /etc/mail with make aliases and setting root passwd with passwd(1) but those can be done after the first boot as well.

 

[wblock@]

This can be done with virtualization software. It might require a fight to get it to access the new drives directly, depending on the type of virtualization chosen.