Hi,
I have an older system on physical hardware that needs upgrading. I've
been procrastinating because it's the type of thing that needs to be
done from start to finish, and it's rather out of date (OpenBSD
5.2-current) so I know there will be all sorts of surprises.
I have Virtualbox (2.2.4) running on my Windows PC and able to
boot/install OpenBSD in it.
I had (what I think is) a great thought today that maybe I could
(somehow) restore a backup from my physical hardware into the Virtualbox
VM and do a "test" upgrade there, figuring things out bit by bit with no
pressure of my system being down. Once I had the upgrade process
figured out, I'd then be better prepared to do it to my physical system.
I have never done a dump/restore of a complete system before. I do know
that on my physical system, the hard disk is sd0 whereas the VM, it's
wd0 (with an OpenBSD 5.5 install... yes, I know 5.6 is imminent). Not a
big deal to tweak /etc/fstab though.
I'm reasonably comfortable with dump/restore, but not to completely
"clone" a system.
How can I do a dump of the root filesystem over top of a running system
(in the VM)? Does it have to be in single user mode?
Are there any other things that are going to need to be tweaked other
than /etc/fstab?
Am I going to need to run installboot or some other such utility to get
it to boot correctly after a restore?
Any thoughts of this idea in general?
Thanks,
Steve Williams
