RedHat 5.1 upgrade blew out 4.2 and MBR

by badpenn » Wed, 22 Jul 1998 04:00:00

Hi, all,

Just to make you aware of a problem I had last weekend upgrading from RH
4.2 to 5.1. There was not enough disk space to complete the upgrade.
Rather than failing gracefully, the upgrade blew out the MBR and enough
of my 4.2 installation that I could not reboot it. It's taken me a
solid week to recover.

Moral: CHECK YOUR DISK SPACE BEFORE UPGRADING!

Red Hat, if you're reading this, it would be nice if the upgrade scripts
would check that adequate space exists, so that future users don't have
to go through what I have.

Regards,
- Steve Masticola
masticol scr siemens com

Top

1. Upgrading from Redhat 4.2 to 5.1 remotely - suggestions??

I'm considering upgrading my system from Redhat 4.2 to 5.1. The version of
4.2 is vanilla - no recompiled kernel, no additional packages - it's
straight off the FTP site from last June.

Here's the hitch - the machine is in a secure server room which I don't
have routine access to - it's a bit of a haul over there, and I have to
coordinate with the site manager to get in the room. So I want to do the
upgrade remotely, telnetting in from home, gaining root access vi "su",
and proceeding with the upgrade.

Is this doable? Reasonable?

I want to do this in such a way as to minimize the chances of crashing
the system - I'd like to avoid having the system off-line for hours or
more until I get access. The way I'd like to proceed is:

1) Replace the 2.0.30 kernel with 2.0.34-pre using rpm -U to
(Note - there are no IDE hard drives on the system, although the floppy
and CD are on the IDE chain. The SCSI Drivers and ethernet card are
handled as modules ...

2) Begin replacing system packages by manually running rpm -U in a
reasonable order - hopefully there are no circular dependancies in the
RPMS files.
(Question: in order for "-U" to uninstall previous versions, do I
need the *old* .rpm file from v4.2 on disk as well as the v5.1 version,
or is the package information available without the old .rpm file present?)

3) reboot (shutdown -r now) and hopefully have the new v5.1 system come up.

The system is used as a web server and telnet host for about a half dozen
users. We don't use X-Windows (yet); there are no dial-in lines; if I
can get it to a state where the system boots and telnet, mail, ftp, and
httpd are running, I'm in good shape - I can bang on the other packages
piecemeal.

So, am I nuts, or is this a reasonable way to proceed. (I'm also concerned
about lib5/lib6/glibc conflicts I've seen talkes about - I want to know that
when I reboot remotely, I'll get a system back up that I can telnet back into).

Many thanks in advance.

----
Mike Heney

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