Well it is now time to take the final upgrade steps.
I have spent a bit of time looking here in the archives and googling along on migration, cloning, and copying and don't think I found any approach that includes first setting partitions as you like....
I am working with a different partition setup for Centos 5 than 4 (I've learned a few things in the past year).
So I plan is:
Do minimum install of Centos 5 to my main drive, using my new partitioning scheme:
A /boot ext3 partition. A swap partition. A LVM partition with: a / ext3 sub-partition. a /home ext3 sub-partition.
while booted from this minimum install, use cp to copy the following directories from the test drive to something like /home/working:
boot, bin, lib, misc, opt, sbin, sys, usr, etc, var, root, tmp
In otherwords skip:
lost+found, mnt, proc, selinux, home, media, net, tftpboot, srv
The reason for including boot is to get the newer kernels. This opens the question of is there anything in places like proc and dev that I need to get becuase they were updated since the 5.0 ISO images?
Once copied, boot from the test drive, mount the old drive, copy from /home/working to the 'real' directories.
Switch drives again, and I should be operational....