On 24/03/2011 03:45, Todd Cary wrote: > I plan to make my current Centos 4 HD a slave and install Centos > 5.5 on a new HD (master). Then comes the challenge of of moving > all of my /home/"user" data to the new master. I have some > preliminary questions: > > Is this a good strategy for installing Centos 5.5: keep the > Centos 4 on a slave disk? > > Will the Centos 5.5 detect the slave disk (Centos 4)? > > Is there a way to move the users, groups and passwords from one > disk to the new Centos 5.5? > > IT departments must have servers go down or want to install a new > version of Linux and have the same challenges. Starting with a new disk and making the old one a slave is a very good idea. That's exactly what I'd do in your situation. Even better if you mount the partitions on the slave as read-only then you know you have a fall-back position. Start with your new install and get all the packages installed that you need. Now, assuming you aren't using anything clever for user logins you can splice the users part of /etc/passwd /etc/shadow and /etc/group on to the system parts of the new install. Don't overwrite the systems stuff as they may have changed between versions. Then copy over /home using rsync or similar - if you had this as a separate drive like I do then simply re-mount it. Make sure the user and group permissions look right - if you spliced passwd and group properly then they'll be fine. Lastly you need to go through the servers and services you need running and sort out the /etc directory entries for them. Don't be tempted to just copy the old files over - it works most of the time but you'll get bitten if the format of the file has changed.