Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:
Andy Green <andy@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
I am not overwhelmed by this "overwhelming argument": I do clean
installs and upgrades just fine with /home in /.
Please do tell us how you do this.
The last time I needed to actually get distribution media packages on to
a box was when I took that box off Development a couple of years ago.
Neither an upgrade install nor a "install" (which I was thinking of as a
"clean install", actually, but it doesn't matter) over that filesystem
did anything useful, because anaconda/rpm saw that to its mind "later"
packages were already in there and did not update them, despite it was
asked to perform an "install".
What I did then was to boot in linux rescue from the install media,
mount the / filesystem and
rm -rf /usr/* /var/* ...
then I umounted the / filesystem and did the "install" (sans format!),
which worked fine and my box was off the at that time extremely shaky
Development stuff.
I have an FC5 system with 4 200G disks and 2 logical volumes spread
over all 4 of them. I need to figure out how to just nuke the fc5
bits while retaining the second volume group.
Why must the FC5 bits get nuked? I didn't get what the driving force
for the effort is.
I was going to try to boot the install dvd, mount the volume 00 (say
on /mnt), mkdir /mnt/fc5 ; mv /mnt/* /mnt/fc5
Is this what you do? Is there a better way? Backing up ~800GB of
data is going to take one heck of a big pile of DVD's.
Well without a backup your data is in a fragile way anyway. A good way
if faced with something tricky is to buy a new, bigger HDD, so the old
implementation becomes the backup and the data is migrated to the new
HDD. You can get a 750GB HDD nowadays that replaces your four drives in
one: unless your drives were raided your reliability actually goes up.
-Andy
