UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

I have an Ultra 5 loaded with Solaris 6. I am attempting to upgrade to Solaris 8. The software I recieved explains the there is a Solris 8 Installation cd and a set of 2 Solaris 8 software cd's. The instructions are a bit vague as to which cd to use. But it does seem to indicate to use the installation cd and you will get a menu with either the upgrade or initial installation options. The installation cd only wants to format the root hard drive, no menu is available. This is unacceptable. The other 2 cd's come back with a message indicating that the file just loaded appears not to be executable and the machine immediately boots up to run level 3. All the latest patches have been applied to my sol 6 load. Am I missing something or what. Does anyone have a clue as to how to do this upgrade.

when i reinstalled. altho i did a FULL install not an upgrade. these are the steps i took.

1) i inserted the boot cdrom for sol8.
2) typed boot cdrom at the "ok" prompt.
3) it loaded and asked a questions or so about swap and which was my root disk.
4) asked it if was a INSTALL or an UPGRADE.

from here on it would be differant. please note it has been a few months since i installed adn i dont have an extrat 3500 laying around (altho that would be niCe tho) to test this for you.

That is the procedure documented by sun i've been following. It works on our other Ultra 5's, just not the one I'm having the problem with. Soon I will be upgrading our e3000's nd if I run into the same problems I'd like to have some options, an initial install would not be very welcome since there are many files on the root disk which we need and would be lost in an initial install.

thanks for your comments and if you have any ideas why this particular machine doesn't load the solaris 8 boot cd properly, such as something on the system I can look at and change, please let me know.

Found the following on SunSolve for 2.5 and 2.6 - it may be true with 2.8 also.

Synopsis: want to upgrade operating system from Solaris 2.5 to 2.6
no upgrade option is presented when running "boot cdrom"
at the ok propmt


There is a bug filed against this Bug ID: 1170953 saying that this occur when
/var/sadm is a link or /var/sadm/softinfo/INST_RELEASE file is missing.

There is one more reason I found and wanted to document. If the root disk used to be
encapsulated with volume manager and was NOT unencapsulated before starting the
upgrade it will result in similar result, upgrade option will not be there when
booting from cdrom.

Resolution:

1. Boot system from disk

2. a. - unencapsulate root disk with "vxunroot"
- stop all volumes
- backout vm patches
- remove vm packages

OR

b. - run "upgrade_start" veritas script

3. halt

4. boot cdrom => upgrade