> On Wed, Dec 19, 2018 at 01:50:06PM -0500, Fred Smith wrote: >> hI ALL! >> >> There have been a large enough number of people posting here about >> difficulties when upgrading from 7. to 7.6 that I'm being somewhat >> paranoid about it. >> >> I have several machines to upgrade, but so far the only one I've dared >> to work on (least critical if it goes bad) is my new-to-me-but-used >> laptop. >> >> First I did a 'dd' backup of the whole drive onto an external USB drive >> then did the upgrade. Since I use the Mate desktop, I enabled the >> epel testing repo (per postings on Mate troubles at the time of the >> upgrade). >> >> Result: Boots to GDM just fine, but Mate is a black screen. Switching >> to Gnome, works fine, but I can't stand Gnome. Not knowing what else >> to try I restored the dd backup. >> >> Later I inserted a spare HD and did a new install from the DVD >> media. This installed without issue, but now no desktop works. >> Switching to a console (CTRL-ALT-F2) I did a full "yum update", >> which installed quite a few packages, but upon reboot nothing had >> improved. So I added the epel repo (and testing) and installed Mate. >> Ditto, nothing had changed. >> >> This laptop is fairly old, and according to lshw, has a RV635/M86 >> [Mobility Radeon HD 3650]I] video chipset, in case it matters. >> CPU is identified as: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T9400 @ 2.53GHz >> >> Having previously installed 7.5 on it without trouble, on which Mate >> works just fine, I wonder what could have become so broken that neither >> an upgrade nor a fresh install works. >> >> I have, as I said, several other machines to upgrade, too, some of them >> have Nvidia grahics (esp. my main desktop box, which also uses Linux >> software RAID-1) and all run Mate. Then there is a netbook (low >> priority) >> a couple of VMs (in virtualbox) and at work several other VMS as well as >> bare-metal on a Lenovo deskside machine, and I'm afraid to do an update >> on all of them because I need them to be in usable condition. The Lenovo >> box in my office is somewhat urgent, as I am about to retire and turn >> it over to someone else who doesn't know much about Linux. >> >> I'd appreciate any advice I can get on how to get these systems upgraded >> without breaking them. >> >> thanks in advance for your help! >> >> Fred > > One more data point: After taking a dd backup of the HD in my Acer > Aspire One netbook (screaming 1.6 GHz Atom, dual core!!), I did the > 7.5 to 7.6 update and it went perfectly fine, although it had 800 > packages to update, so it was kinda slow. > > Do any of you know if the various Nvidia issues, and problems upgrading > software RAID1 systems have reached resolution? I haven't seen postings > here regarding solutions for those problems, and knowing my luck, I would > hit both of 'em on my personal desktop. I didn't see any issues with RAID. I think those problems arise only if you have old RAID devices created with older CentOS releases than 7. Those were probably created with 0.9 metadata version which may be a problem. Currently 1.2 metadata version is created and I didn't see any issues with it. Maybe others can confirm my conclution. Regards, Simon