How I did my upgrade

[Charles Hallenbeck]

I thought there might be some interest in how I did my Slackware upgrade
from version 4.0 to 7.1 while switching from an old machine to a newer
one. If not, you know where the "d" key is!

Old machine - Slackware 4.0 on an 8GB hard disk, plus an unused 800MB
second hard disk. It had an internal DoublEtalk card and modem, an AWE64
sound card with alsa drivers version 4.1.

New machine - 10GB hard disk unpartitioned, external modem and Doubletalk,
sound card is sblive. Vendor knows nothing about Linux but trusts me to
figure things out. <HA>

The plan - use the old system to download three files from the speakup ftp
area: Joe Norton's Slackware kernels "dtlk.dsk" for the old system and
"ltlk.dsk" for the new one, plus "color.gz" for Slackware 7.1. Prepare two
boot disks and one root disk and label them with braille! Test them. There
was SOME trouble making the LTLK.DSK boot disk work on the old system,
which was not solved by supplying lilo parameters. The problem turned out
to be that the bios either did not initialize the serial port to which the
doubletalk was attached, or else it initialized it to the wrong values.
The way to make the LTLK.DSK boot disk work during tests on the old system
was to bring the system up in DOS first, then do a soft reset
(ctrl-alt-delete) to the boot disk. Whew! That was a close one. Be sure to
ask Rich at Glenco to see that the bios initializes the serial ports to
9600,n,8,1 before delivering the new machine, since that is an operation I
cannot perform by myself.

Next - create a directory on the 8GB disk called "slakware" and use "wget"
to download a mirror of the corresponding directory on the Slackware site.
No kidding! That was About 368 megabytes and it ran for 46 hours, but it
completed successfully and I then had the Slackware 7.1 installation
directory on my old machine's hard disk.

Next - use the DTLK.DSK boot disk and COLOR.GZ to install 7.1 onto the
small 800MB hard disk. I created a 64MB swap partition and the balance of
the disk in a single Linux native partition, and the installation went
okay. I did not create a boot disk or a rescue disk, nor did I install
lilo with this installation. Not ready for that yet.  Instead I copied the
new kernel to a DOS partition on the 8GB drive, from which I created an
unusual boot disk which you might be interested in.

Boot disk - I created a bootable DOS diskette and put on it a copy of
loadlin and the new kernel from the 7.1 installation. I created a batch
file called "go.bat" that invoked loadlin WITH the proper parameters to
reboot the new system. That way I could easily change the "hdb" to "hda"
when the second hard disk would later become the first one! Test this
concept - it worked fine. I could boot with the DOS disk, get past the
date and time prompts, and type "go" to bring up the new Linux system from
the /dev/hdb disk.

Next - The plan is to take the old system to the vendor, who will (1) take
the primary disk from it and install it as the secondary disk in the new
system; move the secondary disk to the primary one on the old system; move
the HP scanner interface card from the old system to the new one; and
install a network card in the old system as well as the new one. To
prepare for those steps, I modified the "go.bat" file to refer to /dev/hda
instead of /dev/hdb, and changed all references in the file /etc/fstab
from /dev/hdb to /dev/hda. Those were the only changes necessary to
anticipate moving the secondary disk to the primary position. Later when I
got the old machine back, I used the DOS diskette to get the Linux system
started, and then installed lilo to go instantly into Linux (no more DOS
on this baby!) and created a couple of system-specific boot disks.
Everything worked like a charm.

Next - When the new system arrived, it had an unformaTTED 10gb HARD DISK
IN THE PRIMARY POSITION AND MY OLD 8gb DISK IN THE SECONDARY POSITION, AND
OF COURSE THAT 8gb DISK STILL HAD THE /SLAKWARE DIRECTORY ON ONE OF ITS
PARTITIONS. tHE INSTALLATION WAS THEREFORE A BREEZE - rICH REMEMBERED TO
FIX THE BIOS SETUP, SO THE ltlk.dsk DISK FOUND THE EXPERNAL dOUBLETALK
JUST FINE, AND i USED color.gz TO PARTITION THE NEW DISK AND INSTALL
sLACKWARE 7.1 ON IT FROM THE FILES ON THE SECONDARY DISK.

tHE REST OF THE DETAILS HERE ARE NOT SPECIAL AT ALL - i HAVE HAD THE USUAL
AWKWARDNESSES GETTING TO KNOW MY EXTERNAL MODEM AND FIGURING OUT HOW TO
USE THE NEW SOUND CARD, MUCH OF WHICH i HAVE SOUGHT HELP WITH FROM LIST
MEMBERS. i HAVE DECIDED TO UPGRADE EVERY PIECE OF OBSOLETE SOFTWARE i
COULD THINK OF, AND WITH VIRTUALLY EVERYTHING UPGRADED AT ONCE, i HAVE HAD
MY SHARE OF COMPATIBILITY PROBLEMS. tHE NEW SYSTEM IS A FANTASTIC MACHINE,
AND THE OLD ONE MAKES A NICE STARTER SET FOR SOMEONE. sPECIAL THANKS TO
jOE nORTON FOR MAKING THIS PROCESS SO PAINLESS, AND OF COURSE TO kIRK
rEISER AND HIS HELPERS FOR sPEAKUP ITSELF.

cHUCK.


My web site is http://www.mhonline.net/~chuckh 
Back when I was a boy it was 40 miles toeverywhere,
uphill both ways, and it was always snowing!