Andy Green <andy@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > 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". I did try an upgrade install, but a damaged yum/rpm database file really confused the upgrade logic. That left me with a half fc5 half fc6 system that had non-working xterms. I didn't really expect it to work, I was just curious what would happen. After that, I did poke at the fs a bit from the rescue mode on the install dvd, and then it hit me I really only had vg00 on the first disk and the other vg spaning the other 3 disks. I could safely do a clean install on the first disk leaving the other 3 disks untouched. > Why must the FC5 bits get nuked? I didn't get what the driving force > for the effort is. A few months ago I did a "yum -y update ; shutdown -r now". I don't know if the yum database needs a few 10's of seconds to get flushed cleanly, or what, but it got royally scrambled. A "yum list" after the reboot showed that the set of *.db files was corrupted. I could rebuild some of it from the yum cache directory, but roughly 1/3 of the rpm headers (~400) were no longer in the cache. Nuking all of fc5 would be a good way to make sure that everything in the filesystem is accounted for with no stragglers. > 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. Agreed. Its a combination of machine generated data and crap loaded from the net, so losing it wouldn't be the end of the world. In the past I've always bought a newer bigger disk whenever I installed a new OS. I also used to unplug the old disks just to prevent mishaps during the install. I'm still waiting for price parity before I pick up one of the 750GB ones. They still want $100 too much vs. buying 3 of the same series drives populated with 250GB worth of heads and platters. -wolfgang -- Wolfgang S. Rupprecht http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/
