Technical data

22 Chapter 1

Before You Install

Backing Up Your Current System

• If you currently have no operating system or ﬁles on your system or if

you have an OS and software that you can safely destroy, there is no

need to perform a backup. You can now proceed with the installation

and later set up a backup procedure.

• If you already have an operating system and ﬁles on the system disk,

you should make a full backup of the system before you start the

install.

• If your system is running a 9.0x version of HP-UX, you may want to

upgrade to HP-UX 10.20 (via 10.01), not install it. See the manual

Upgrading from HP-UX 9.x to 10.x for detailed procedures for

performing an upgrade.

• You must be running 9.0 or later to upgrade to 10.20.

• If you have a system running a pre-9.0x version of HP-UX, and you

are willing to destroy all system customization in order to install

10.20, then cold-installing 10.20 may be the right answer.

Remember that HP-UX 10.20 uses pathnames and ﬁle locations that

are different from HP-UX 9.0x. Back up your current system, if any,

in such a way as to separate "structural" (system) directories from

"data" (user and application) directories. This will allow you to

recover data directories onto 10.20 without compromising the 10.20

structure.

You should not recover any pre-10.0 "structural" ﬁles onto the 10.20

system. Recover them only if the 10.20 install fails for some reason and

you need to restore the pre-10.0 version of HP-UX.

For additional backup security for cold install, you can optionally do the

following:

• Make printouts of customized ﬁles and refer to them after the

installation (for example, ﬁles such as .profile, /etc/netlinkrc,

/etc/passwd).

• Collect customized ﬁles in a directory (for example, /old). Use

tar(1) to make a tape archive of the ﬁles in /old. After the

installation, restore the ﬁles, editing them as desired.