Kevin - When the time comes, I may need help in creating the command that excludes the entries in owner, group, password and shadow tables for "system" entries. Todd On 3/24/2011 5:17 AM, Kevin Thorpe wrote: > 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. > > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos > > -- Ariste Software Petaluma, CA 94952 http://www.aristesoftware.com