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....