upgrade question

[Chen_7]

Could someone explain what exactly a cold-installation would do ... I am aware that it wipes off root ... Can you explain if it would wipe off everything .. kernel .... etc ...

[harry d brown jr · Accepted solution]

A cold installation (also known as a virgin install) will wipe out all of vg00 and potentially anything else you have.

Ideally you do TWO make_tape_recovery's of vg00 and TWO backups of your data volumes (any non vg00).

Additionally I like to make sure I have a current ioscan and print_mainfest of my machine so I can build it from scratch quickly.

If you have other vg's, you can vgexport those (saving the map file and copying it to another machine for later use). Just make sure your new OS install goes on only the disks you are currently using for vg00. If you use another disk you will clobber the vg on that disk.

live free or die
harry d brown jr

[Biswajit Tripathy]

Cold install cleans EVERYTHING :-)

Make sure that you note down the networking
configurations (i.e hostname / IP addresses of
interface cards / gateway and DNS server addresses
(NIS, NIS+ details if you use those)) and h/w address
of disks you want to install the new OS (i.e output
of "ioscan -nfkC disk" and "lvlnboot -v") etc.

- Biswajit

[A. Clay Stephenson]

A cold install blows away everything in the boot volume group (almost always /dev/vg00). However, other volume groups are left intact so that after the cold install it is very easy to vgimport all the non-vg00 data --- especuially if you create map files (using vgexport -p -m /tmp/vg01.map /dev/vg01) before doing the install. These map files would need to be saved or printed.

[Steven E. Protter]

Cold install: nothing that was there is there afer the install. If you have enough disks, you can cold install into a new disk, leaving the old partition bootable.

In general, when I'm asked to erase a machine I do a full install, cold, include all disks. nothing kernel, data, disk can survive this.

SEP

[Chen_7]

Thank you. Are there any prerequisites such a patches etc.. for a system to have coldinstall? Can you please suggest? Any important rerequisites? patches?

[A. Clay Stephenson]

There are no patches to install before a cold install and in fact you couldn't do it if you wanted to. There might be some required firmware to install but since you didn't bother to mention your OS release or your hardware, it's not possible to tell you.
You need to examine the Release Notes and Installation manual for whatever version of HP-UX you are installing.