[CentOS] Re: how to change distro live?

Farkas Levente wrote:

hi, we've got many mandrake 8,9 and 10 system remotely. we'd like to remotely replace these systems to centos 5. we've 4 disk in them. one is the system drive (no need for raid) and there is free space on the remaining 3 disk. so what we think about:

• download the new system to the data disks
• install grub (mandrake has lilo) to boot the old system and reboot
• create the old system in the data disk
• update grub to boot the old system from the data disk and reboot
• repartition the system disk
• transfer the new system to the system disk
• update grub to boot form new system disk and reboot.

this seems to easy but has many very dangerous steps and we has only remote ssh access to the system. if we loose the connections we can't access the system anymore and we've to travel a lot! another constrain that we should have to do this very fast ie. it'd be nice if the system wouldn't be down for a long time.

• what would be the best method for this?
• what are the dangerous step here?
• what would be the best way and format to transfer the new system to

the disk (we think about an iso file)?

• does anybody do such thing and what is his experience?

thank you for your help in advance.

See koan, a helper program with cobbler http://cobbler.et.redhat.com/