Those Pre-Install Blues

[Mike Stefanik/78125]

In article <1990Dec5.013027.19510 at rice.edu>, johnson at horta.rice.edu (Bruce Johnson) writes:
> 
> 	We just got a model 530 in and appear to have been bitten
> by the same "feature" with pre-installed software.  Guessing our
> way through installation procedures, we hit failures which have
> been tracked to this huge /usr partition taking over the 355 MB
> (unformatted) disk.  The failure turns out to be because the root
> partition is full and has nowhere to grow.
> 
> 	Now what?  We have succeeded in getting Wren VII's mounted
> on external SCSI, so there is no problem with making a copy of the
> entire set of file systems on the 355 if that will help.  That is,
> we thought it might be possible to reconstruct /usr.  But we seem to 
> not even be able to umount /usr because it is always busy (probably
> this pesky errdaemon that runs from there).  Is booting from a floppy
> the way to do this?

I have run into the same sort of thing when trying to install a 320.
What I've done is backed the preloaded stuff on to tape (ala backup)
and then removed them.  Then, I would backup /usr and edit the
/etc/filesystems file so that /usr would "disappear".  When you reboot
the machine, it'll scream about not finding /usr, but you'll come up
anyway.  At that point, ed the /etc/filesystems file to put back the
/usr filesystem and rmfs /usr (to remove the filesystem).  Then use
mkfs to create a new /usr of modest size, and restore the filesystem
sans preloads.  Then reboot again.  When you install, install from
the tape you created of the preloads, and away you go.  As they install
they will tend to bloat /usr, but not to the point of eating the whole
disk.

Hope that helps.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Stefanik, Systems Engineer (JOAT), Briareus Corporation
UUCP: ...!uunet!bria!mike
"If it was hard to code, it should be harder to use!"