OpenBSD Upgrade Documentation

I had a recent experience trying to upgrade to 3.3-current on a Compaq 2500. I tried all three floppy images and they booted, but the scsi disks were not recognized, so I though I was out of luck. I had tried ftping a copy of the snapshot bsd.rd, but when the machine booted and I typed "boot hd0a:/bsd.rd" it started the load and loacked up, due to the differences between a.out and ELF format.

I thought of trying to burn a cd with bsd.rd on it, but came up with a shortcut:

On a running a.out system, ftp the 3.3-current ELF image of bsd.rd to /
Get and create a floppy with the 3.3-current floppy33.fs image on it (it doesn't matter which one you use, all it need to do is run the boot loader).
Boot the floppy disk, and a the boot prompt> enter:
"boot hd0a:/bsd.rd" and vola! you are off and running an install based on the more complete cd installation kernel. I think the only way to go is to (I)nstall rather than (U)pgrade, when going from a.out to ELF. You also have to specify /pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/i386 as the directory, since the 3.3/3.4 directory is not what you want.

Simple, no need to compile, you get to go through the install process and tweak partitions if you want, etc. OF course, if the install fails, you have a wrecked system, but you were trying to install a snapshot - bleeding edge, remember-? One additional benefit is the opportunity to check the dmesg to see if everything is recognized by the kernel.

Hmmm, this looks like an interesting upgrade method. Going to give it a shot and see if I can learn anything!

A few week a go, I get too excited to upgrade to the new ELF format, after downloading -current the night before, like I always do to upgrade the tarball with simple command:

tar xpzf -C /

unbelievably, I did it with the new ELF tarball format!, a few seconds later, I got my system panicked and unbootable, few hours later, I successfully cleaned the mess :)