[CentOS] Installing CentOS-7 but keeping CentOS-6.5

Sun Jul 13 17:01:38 UTC 2014
Timothy Murphy <gayleard at alice.it>

I'm having trouble installing CentOS-7 on my HP MicroServer.
I've tried with KDE LiveCD and Netinstall (both on USB sticks),
and now I'm going to try with the DVD ISO.

But I want to be quite sure I can return to CentOS-6.5
if things go wrong, so I'm wondering what precisely I need to copy
(eg the MBR and a bit more) so that I could get back to things as they were.
Is this documented anywhere?

Actually, both failed installations did give a boot menu
including the old 6.5 system,
but I'm afraid sometime this might not work,
and I will be cut off from the world.

Incidentally, the "Repair" option on the netinstall system
was not as useful as I expected,
or perhaps I don't know how to use it properly.
It entered the new CentOS-7 system OK on chroot-ing,
even mounting other partitions listed in /etc/fstab .
And I was able to bring up the interfaces with "service network restart".
But although I ran grub2-install , this did not help matters.

Is there anything else one can do after chrooting into a system?
Eg, can one boot the system in any way?

Any advice or suggestions gratefully received.



-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland