[CentOS] how can i upgrade my Centos from 4 to 5.1

Johnny Hughes johnny at centos.org
Mon Jan 7 12:14:19 UTC 2008


Robert Slade wrote:
> John R Pierce wrote:
>> Tolun ARDAHANLI wrote:
>>> Hi;
>>>
>>> How can I upgrade my Centos from 4 to 5.1?
>>
>> make full backups of all your system volumes (/, /var, and so forth if
>> you have them as seperate volumes), shutdown and boot the CentOS 5.x
>> CD, run an upgrade.
>>
>> this will probably work if your system is quite stock and you've not
>> installed any non-centos4 stuff on it.    if you've got a mess of
>> stuff from non-RPM sources and/or nonstandard repositories, chances
>> are you''ll either spend about 60 hours picking through the pieces
>> trying to get it all sorted out, or you'll end up restoring your backups.
>>
>>
>> Personally, I recommend clean installs.   backup your user stuff,
>> config files, etc, then wipe and rebuild the system scratch, referring
>> to the previous configs and stuff for reference.
>>
> I tried to 'upgrade' but ran into a number of problems some of which I
> still have not resolved - Messages and boot log not being written to for
> a start.
> 
> I would strongly recommend backing up the data etc and doing a
> reinstall  - I have spent more time fixing problems than the time to
> reconfig.

I want to agree with this ... upgrades are usually bad ... and it
doesn't matter what your OS.

Windows server upgrades hardly ever go good from things like:

WinNT => Win2000
Win2000 => Win2003

Nor do client upgrades like:

Win2000 or Win90 => WInXP
WinXP => WinVista

It is just not good to bring over baggage that is the old registry ...
same holds true for linux upgrades.

Anaconda can change out some programs ... however, just like the windows
registry, several config files and other things get orphaned.

Also ... debian and ubuntu people say apt allows them to upgrade bwtween
releases.  In practice, that does not work much better when doing major
version changes either.  Nothing you can do is going to automatically
make a apache 1.2 config work on apcahe 2.0 or 2.2 ... likewise,
shifting from xfree86 to xorg or mysql-3.x to mysql-5.x, etc is going to
require work.  This is regardless of OS.

With debian ... there are also many things that need to be resolved
after an upgrade.  It is almost always MUCH faster and easier to backup
info, fresh install and bring over data.

SO ... the recommendation is to do a fresh install ... see this link:

http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/5.1/Installation_Guide/ch-upgrade-x86.html

Thanks,
Johnny Hughes

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 252 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20080107/9e78b8ee/attachment.sig>


More information about the CentOS mailing list