Scenario of a failed upgrade - advice request
This posting - sent via gmane - is my second attempt to send this
posting. If the first attempt ultimately reached its intended
destination, then I apologise for wasting time and bandwidth. The
original message read as follows:
| I have acquired a DVD set of the official release of Debian 4.0 and
| studied the "release notes" to the best of my abilities.
|
| And have taken to heart the included advice to make a full copy of my
| current clean and fully operational Sarge installation.
|
| I am left with one query that is best explained by a hypothetical
| situation - which, hopefully, will never happen.
|
| Assume that my upgrade to Etch has managed to get to the end of the
| "dist-upgrade" step without any obvious major hitch. What steps can I
| take - before or after running "/sbin/lilo" to ensure that the bootloader
| will recognise not only the newly-installed Etch but also my backup copy
| of Sarge. And - most important - will load the Sarge-backup even if an
| attempted boot into Etch fails.
|
| Specifically what entries should be present in my "boot" directory, my
| /etc/lilo.conf file and (possibly) elsewhere before I shut down the
| computer and attempt to reboot.
Since posting the above message, I have confirmed that I can (currently)
use LILO to boot both my installed Sarge and my backup Sarge. I can
therefore make my queries more concrete. They now read:
a) I would like to ensure that after the upgrade to Etch, the 2 "image"
entries in /etc/lilo.conf point to the correct images. The sample
file in "man lilo.conf" gives the full path (i.e. /boot/IMAGE)
to each image in the (sample) boot directory. Is this mandatory once
the boot directory contains more than one image?
b) will an attempt to boot into the backup Sarge work if only the
"etch-upgraded" version of "initrd" is present in the upgraded /boot
directory? and
c) do the symlinks in the O/S's root need editing?
I am aware that I will know the answer to these questions after the
upgrade. But "forewarned is forearmed.".
All advice will be gratefully received.
Felix Karpfen
--
Felix Karpfen
Public Key 72FDF9DF (DH/DSA)
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