1The upgrade to NetBSD _VER is a binary upgrade; it would be prohibitive 2to make users upgrade by compiling and installing the _VER sources, and 3it would be very difficult to even compile a set of instructions that 4allowed them to do so. Because of the many changes to the system, it 5is difficult and impractical to upgrade by recompiling from the sources 6and installing. 7 8To do the upgrade, you must have the boot floppy image (boot.fs) 9available. You must also have at least the "base" and "kern" 10binary distribution sets available, so that you can upgrade with it, 11using one of the upgrade methods described above. Finally, you must 12have sufficient disk space available to install the new binaries. 13Since the old binaries are being overwritten in place, you only need 14space for the new binaries, which weren't previously on the system. 15If you have a few megabytes free on each of your root and /usr 16partitions, you should have enough space. 17 18Since upgrading involves replacing the boot blocks on your NetBSD 19partition, the kernel, and most of the system binaries, it has the 20potential to cause data loss. You are strongly advised to BACK UP ANY 21IMPORTANT DATA ON YOUR DISK, whether on the NetBSD partition or on 22another operating system's partition, before beginning the upgrade 23process. 24 25The upgrade procedure using the sysinst tool is basically the 26same as an installation, but without the hard disk partitioning. 27Another difference is that existing configuration files in /etc 28are backed up, and merged with the new files. Getting the binary 29sets is done in the same manner as the installation procedure; 30refer to the installation part of the document, section 7 and 8, 31on how to do this. Also, some sanity checks are done, i.e. 32filesystems are checked before unpacking the sets. 33 34After a new kernel has been copied to your hard disk, your 35machine is a complete NetBSD _VER system. However, that 36doesn't mean that you're finished with the upgrade process. 37You will probably want to update the set of device 38nodes you have in /dev. If you've changed the contents of 39/dev by hand, you will need to be careful about this, but if 40not, you can just cd into /dev, and run the command "sh 41MAKEDEV all". 42 43You must also deal with certain changes in the formats of 44some of the configuration files. The most notable change is 45that the "options" given to many of the file systems in 46/etc/fstab or by hand have changed, and some of the file 47systems have changed names. To find out what the new options 48are, it's suggested that you read the manual page 49for the file systems' mount commands, for example mount_nfs(8) 50for NFS. 51 52Finally, you will want to delete old binaries that were part 53of the version of NetBSD that you upgraded from and have since 54been removed from the NetBSD distribution. 55