[CentOS] Migrating RHEL 3 to Centos 5.2 - has Adaptec 2400a RAID

Tue Jul 29 19:16:58 UTC 2008
Ed Westphal <enwestph at rochester.rr.com>

Many thanks Les. I was hoping I'd hear exactly what you've said. I'll 
have to post once I've accomplished. Take care.

Les Mikesell wrote:
> Ed Westphal wrote:
>>    Greetings all. I'm new to the mailing list. Hope to get to know 
>> many of you. I'll jump right in with a recent project. I have a 
>> machine with RHEL WS 3 - Taroon; plus dual boot to Win 2000 Pro. The 
>> RAID card is Adaptec's 2400A w/128 megs cache, running RAID 10 on 4 
>> WD's. I want to migrate to 5.2 Centos and wipe the NTFS partition. I 
>> have the 5.2 Centos DVD. Anyone see any problems, special preparation 
>> needed, whatever, to accomplish the migration? The RAID uses dpt_i2o 
>> drivers. The NVidia card can get drivers from their website, if need 
>> be to support full functionality. Please advise with any cautions, 
>> considerations, you may care to give. Thanks in advance.
>
> I'd recommend doing a backup, re-installing from scratch, then 
> restoring or reinstalling any old stuff you needed instead of trying 
> an upgrade (which might work, but you don't know how much old gunk is 
> left).  The exception would be if you have separate partitions with 
> old data you could keep them and not reformat.
>
> One difference you might see is that in 5.x devices are detected in 
> more or less random order.  If you have more than one NIC, you won't 
> know ahead of time which will be eth0 - but once configured it will 
> stay identified by the HWDADDR entry n the config file.  Likewise for 
> your disk drives - sata devices may take /dev/sd? names but mounts 
> will match the disk labels.
>