in-place clean installs with one / partition

Andy Green andy at warmcat.com
Fri Oct 27 04:37:40 UTC 2006


Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:
> Andy Green <andy at warmcat.com> 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




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