Re: in-place clean installs with one / partition
Andy Green <andy(a)warmcat.com> 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/