[CentOS] How should I reinstall CentOS?

[Les Mikesell]

On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 11:59 AM, Michael Hennebry
<hennebry at web.cs.ndsu.nodak.edu> wrote:
>
> Maybe I was not clear.
> I'm refering to reinstalling CentOS.
> My current CentOS hangs after trying to start gdm.
> My diagnostic efforts have been for nought,
> so I want to more or less start over.
> I already have a "list" of all the repositories I want.
> It's the contents of the aforementioned /etc/yum/repos.d .
>
> I could try to install every single repository by hand.
>
> I don't remember how I installed most of them, but I could try.
> I would probably succeed, but its not a certainty.
> Following that, I could install all the packages by hand.
> I could edit my list of installed packages and make a massive yum command.

Most repositories will have a 'name-release.rpm' where name is the
name of the repository.   This will install the entry under
/etc/yum/repos.d and set up the gpg key for the rpms.  If you have a
URL to the repo release rpm, yum can install for you  with:
yum install URL
However, note that your current problem may be related to something
you've pulled from a 3rd party repository so you should avoid blindly
repeating the process.   I'd install/update the package list from the
base repositories first, then add EPEL and others with a policy of not
overwriting base packages and make sure everything works before
installing anything from repos that may overwrite any base packages.
I normally keep any in the latter category set as 'enabled = 0' in the
repo file and use --enablerepo= on the yum command line when I want
something from them.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com