[Info-vax] Alpha V8.4-2 distribution

[Jan-Erik Soderholm]

Den 2016-06-19 kl. 05:51, skrev David Froble:
> It's Saturday night, or I'd ask VSI.  So it's your lucky day to consider my
> question.
>
> Got the Alpha 8.4-2 evaluation kit.  Unzipped it on my Alpha, got an iso
> image, which I was able to mount using LD.  The kit will work as an upgrade
> to V8.3, or later, but will not (according to the release notes) install on
> an empty disk. No problem, made an image copy of my 8.3 system disk.
>
> Now, it's been a LONGGGG time since I did any installations / upgrades, and
> I'm not sure what can be done.  What I remember is you boot off the
> distribution media and use the menu to install or upgrade.  Can't boot off
> an LD container, since it needs VMS up before LD works.  Chicken and egg
> issues ....
>
> What I think I need to do is backup /image the LD container onto a spare
> disk. Can't use the optical drive.  The local crumudgen got a good laugh
> when I told him I was trying to read a DVD and finally realized the Alpha
> had a CD drive. Gonna attempt to fix that next week.  Don't think the
> distribution will fit on a CD.

The original download did not fit on a CD since there was a large file
stored in the ISO as two copies by mistake. I took that away and re-built
the ISO and my ISO did then fit on a CD.

VSI also release an updated ISO shortly after this error was reported,
and it is now "589.5 MB" according to the download page.

Do you still have the origanal ISO? That was around 1 GB, I think...
If so, just fetch the latest copy from VSI.


Anyway...

If you have a spare disk you can copy the ISO to that one and boot from
it. Philip described that in another post.

And you should be able to either INSTALL or UPGRADE using this dist,
either from a spare disk or from a CD.


Regards, Jan-Erik.




>
> Anyway, yeah, I'll get around to it, my question.  Can I upgrade VMS while
> running on a system disk, or do I need to have distribution media I can
> boot from?