At Tue, 5 Jan 2010 11:26:32 -0800 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 11:24 AM, MHR mhullrich@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 7:46 AM, Oliver Schulze L. oliver@samera.com.py wrote:
Hi, It is posible to do a simple procedure to upgrade a Centos 5.4 32bits (i686) to a Centos 5.4 64bits(x32_64)?
I was thinking about an upgrade or install without formating.
I will have a current backup before doing it.
Any advice/tips is welcome.
I *strongly* doubt it. When you go from 32 to 64 bit systems, you are essentially replacing the kernel and (at least) about 90% of the standard libraries. I am willing to bet that this mandates an installation.
For the record, I've never tried it. When I put CentOS on my machine, I already had a 64-bit CPU and I never seriously considered NOT using the 64-bit install.
HTH.
mhr
Sorry - PS: IIRC, you don't _have_ to format your disks to install over what's on them - check the installation options when you get that far and read through them carefully. You should be able to re-use existing partitions, but I can't remember whether that *requires* reformatting them - I've just always done that (reformat them).
You really should/ought to reformat /, /usr, and /var. /boot and /home don't need to be reformated (leaving /boot alone allows for multi-OS version booting, eg CentOS 4 and CentOS 5 or Ubuntu and CentOS or CentOS and Fedora, etc.). The installer will be unhappy about NOT reformatting /, /usr, or /var. It will warn about not reformatting /boot -- this is generally OK though. It will NOT complain about not reformatting /home or any other random non-system file system you might have (I do things like have a dedicated /mp3s file system on my laptop for example).
Unlike the *default* file system setup, which only creates /boot and / file systems, it is *strongly* recomended to instead create separate /boot, /, and /home file systems (at least these three -- separating out /usr and/or /var might make sense under some situations, esp. servers) -- this allows updates, multi-OS, and recovery without having to make an explicit backup (although, having backups is still recomended!).
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