Upgrading SCO OSV5 5.0.5 to 5.0.6 Problems

[5minmajor]

I have been trying to upgrade 5.0.5 Enterprise to 5.0.6 Enterprise with not luck!
I am running VDM but have the Boot/Root/Swap partitions turned off. My /u is on a second SCSI drive and is set up as vdisk4. The machine is running the AH3940UW duel controller with four drives set up to mirror. The tape is on an AH2940UW.
The CD is an IDE on the primary master.

Booting off the CD I use "defbootstr Sdisk=alad(0,0,0,0) Srom=wd(0,0,0,0) and it seems to find the unix partition ok but after I enter the license info it tells me that 5.0.5 is not installed and wants to do a fresh install.

Any help or pointers would be great!

 

[apeasecpc]

I hope you have a good backup of the 5.0.5 system. I've seen this happen when you start an upgrade install and interrupt it before it is complete (intentionally or due to an error), if you try to reinstall after that, it is not able to find the previous OS to do the install as an upgrade. The old OS is still there, the install program just doesn't recognize it.

When this happened to me I just bit the bullet and did a fresh install, then restored my configuration and data files from my backup tape.

 

[5minmajor]

Thanks apeasecpc for your response.
The update never did actually start but it found the unix partition and gave me a message "There is no product to upgrade on your system. To do an automatic upgrade, you must have one of the following products on your system:"

SCOdtes::5.0.5 SCOdtps::5.0.5
""" "" """ """
"" 5.0.0 "" 5.0.0


Is it possible that the OEM changed a the System ID when the initial build and that is why the upgrade does not see it?

If I have to do a fresh install how hard is it to restore all the configuration files since my mail applications are on a seperate hard disk?
I do have a complete system tape of the 5.0.5 from the online system we run every night.

 

[apeasecpc]

Doing a restore after a fresh install is just a matter of knowing what to restore. I've done it enough that I have a list of the critical files for my system. I usually restore my entire backup tape to an unused drive or filesystem so that I can get at the files quickly if I find I have missed something.


You will need to restore the following:

passwd file, group file, and auth directory structure (be sure to confirm your root password is still ok before you log out)

hosts file, ftp config files, uucp files, init.d, gettydefs, inittab, and ttytype (assuming you haven't changed any hardware)

/usr and /usr/bin, and any other custom applications (but do not overwrite any files from the new install, only restore files not already there)

printcap and printer configuration files (be aware that it will be easier to reinstall some printers than to port over old configurations)

mail configuration files (I don't use mail so I can't tell you which ones are relevent)

custom crontab files (make sure they are still relevent to the new OS)


Depending on your setup, there may be other system files that you need.