[TriLUG] upgrade or reinstall?

[John Franklin]

On Tue, Aug 06, 2002 at 10:50:45PM -0400, Mike Broome wrote:
> Anybody have thoughts or opinions on upgrading versus reinstalling to
> get from RH 7.to RH 7.3?  Are there pitfalls of upgrading in place that
> I should be aware of?  Should I expect it to just work flawlessly?

As flawlessly as any other Red Hat install... which isn't very flawless
in my experience.  In particular, my problems have been from RH
installers being completely unable to handle error situations, even
error situations the installer created.

The two problems I can think of off the top of my head are:

1. If your disk has an extended partition, but no logical partitions,
the installer is unable to cope and never gives you a chance to
partition the disks.  (this was experienced with RH7.1)

2. When I was upgrading from 7.1 to 7.3, one of the partitions wasn't
unmounted cleanly.  Rather than attempting to run fsck on the partition
to fix it, the installer insisted I reboot into the existing system, let
the system clean it up, and then boot back into the installer.  This
actually didn't work.  The boot partition was the one that needed
cleaning, but it was never fsck'd.  I don't know why that happened, but
booting the installer in rescue mode and fsck'ing manually worked.

jf
-- 
John Franklin
franklin at elfie.org
ICBM: 35°43'56"N 78°53'27"W