Installing old FreeBSD (7.2, amd64) from DUMP Files

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0922Drg

Hello everyone,
I'm a little stuck - I have an old important PC which doesn't run anymore.
I have dump Backups of the following:
/
/var
/usr
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The System running was:
7.2-STABLE FreeBSD
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I have listings of bsdlabel, dmesg, fstab and gpart for the boot drive.

I've downloaded the 7.2-RELEASE dvd1 and livefs.iso but I am unsure as how to proceed to restore. I'd like to create a virtual machine in Proxmox where I can restore this old PC to.

Thank you very much for your help.
 
We had to import a very old FreeBSD server at some point a few years back We ended up using a recent FreeBSD release, installing the relevant compat files, and then creating a jail for this with the old binaries.
 
gkontos said:
We had to import a very old FreeBSD server at some point a few years back We ended up using a recent FreeBSD release, installing the relevant compat files, and then creating a jail for this with the old binaries.
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Is there any howto I could follow to try this? I'm not a real FreeBSD pro :-).
 
cracauer@ said:
What happens if you just do a `restore` from your dump files?

It is what it is intended for.
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I'll try that - but I'm not very used to FreeBSD - I just found a howto on cloning. I though I'd do an install of the ISO and then restore the dump files. Is there any HowTo or similar I could follow?
 
0922Drg said:
I'll try that - but I'm not very used to FreeBSD - I just found a howto on cloning. I though I'd do an install of the ISO and then restore the dump files. Is there any HowTo or similar I could follow?
Click to expand...

dump + restore is simple. The manpage will do.

restore(8)

man.freebsd.org man.freebsd.org

Kind of similar to un-tarring a tarfile.
 
I've just tried with a new disk and a live-cd from an old freebsd.
I can restore the root dump successfully but on all other dumps I'm getting the following error:
Command:
restore -r -f /mnt/cd/usr.dump
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Response:
Tape is not a dump tape
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Could this be due to the size of the partitions? The root partition was ~1GB the other partitions ~10GB.
I've formatted the partitions with the following command:
newfs -U -O 2 /dev/ad4s1f
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It seems it was a problem with the ISO I've created to mount it in proxmox, now it's working. But I'm out of temp-space :-).
I'll see if I can get a workaround for this working. Thank you for your help!
 
I'm restoring the dump files and it seems to be working. Can I just edit the new disk names in the fstab file to boot from it afterwards (e.g. /dev/da0s1a to /dev/ad4s1a)?
 
0922Drg said:
Can I just edit the new disk names in the fstab file to boot from it afterwards (e.g. /dev/da0s1a to /dev/ad4s1a)?
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Yes, additionally the first time the bootloader might complain too. Just tell it to boot from correct disk.

What's so important that it requires an 11 year old EoL version?
 
Thank you, I'll try.
It's an old project where I need to take a look on the code while it's running - and what better option as to virtualize it :)
 
0922Drg said:
It's an old project where I need to take a look on the code while it's running - and what better option as to virtualize it
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I'd also like to point out the various COMPAT_FREEBSD? options in the kernel, and misc/compat7x and associated compatNx compatibility libraries. Which will allow you to run binaries compiled for old(er) versions of FreeBSD on up to date systems.
 
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