Checklist for Upgrading

Use the following checklist to prepare to upgrade the Solaris operating environment.

• If you intend to upgrade the Solaris software on a system through a tip(1) line, ensure that your window display is at least 80 columns wide and 24 rows long.

  To determine the current dimensions of your tip window, use the stty command. For more information, see the man page, stty(1).

• If the system is part of a network, verify that an Ethernet connector or similar network adapter is connected to your system.

• If you are using the Solaris Web Start program from the Solaris Installation CD, verify that you have a 512–Mbyte slice on the disk. For detailed information, including more requirements for x86 systems, refer to Table 5–2. You can ignore these requirements if you are installing from a DVD or an installation image.

• If you are using Solaris Live Upgrade, determine your resource requirements for creating a new boot environment and upgrading it. For detailed information, refer to Chapter 31, Solaris Live Upgrade (Planning).

• If you are using Solaris Live Upgrade with Solaris Volume Manager, turn root mirroring off. For detailed information, refer to Guidelines for Selecting Slices for File Systems.

• Verify that you have enough disk space. For more information, refer to Chapter 5, System Requirements and Guidelines (Planning).

• SPARC: When you are using DVD media and are asked to boot from the ok prompt, always type the following command: boot cdrom.

• Review the Solaris 9 Release Notes and vendor release notes to ensure that the software you use is still supported in the new release.

• Review the Solaris 9 Sun Hardware Platform Guide to ensure that your hardware is supported.

• Review the documentation that came with your system to make sure your system and devices are supported by the Solaris release.

• Review vendor and third-party software documentation for additional upgrade instructions.

• Check for all of the available patches that you might need. The most recent patch list is provided at http://sunsolve.sun.com.

• Check the system for the existence of Prestoserve software. If you begin the upgrade process by shutting down the system with the init 0 command, you might lose data. Refer to the Prestoserve documentation for shutdown instructions.

• x86: If you are using the Linux operating system, the Solaris fdisk partition and the Linux swap partition use the same identifier, 0x82. To resolve the problem, you can do one of the following.

  • Choose not to use a Linux swap partition at all, provided that you have enough memory.

  • Put the Linux swap partition on another drive.

  • Back up the Linux data you want to keep to storage media, install the Solaris operating environment, and then reinstall Linux.

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    Caution –

    If you decide to install Linux after the Solaris operating environment, when the Linux installation program asks if you want to format the Linux swap partition (actually the Solaris fdisk partition) as a swap file, reply no.

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