[olug] Upgrading to FC4 from FC3

A-Wal A-Wal at cox.net
Wed Jun 15 01:12:03 UTC 2005


Well, this raises another couple of questions.  Here's my current hard 
drive layout.  I have one 200Gb ATA hard drive plugged into the MB, and 
two identical 17Gb scsi plugged into a scsi PCI card.  The MB has a raid 
controller on it, but to date I have never used it.  Unfortunately, the 
raid controller on the MB only allows you to use two ATA hard drives, 
and I only have one.  I was wanting to learn how to setup a raid under 
Linux, but will have to do it using my two scsi hard drives instead.  My 
one ATA hard drive is used for dual windows/Linux.  It has one 100Gb 
partition that windows uses, and I use the other 100Gb for playing with 
Linux.  So far Grub has worked great for dual booting into windows.  The 
idea would be to setup a raid0 using my two 17Gb scsi hard drives, and 
use it for / to speed up overall performance in Linux, and then use the 
other 100Gb from my ATA hard drive for things like /home, /tmp, /usr, 
etc that aren't as performance dependant.  I know that Linux has been 
using scsi since it was pretty much first created, and I was wondering 
if there was a way to setup my two scsi hard drives in raid0 using Linux 
itself, since I can't use my raid controller on the MB.

Jon H. Larsen wrote:

>If your /home directory is a separate partition (eg. /dev/hda2), 
>simply don't format it when you do the install.
>
>If you have one partition of say, /dev/hda1 = / and no separate /home, 
>then you will need to either backup your /home partition or just your 
>/home/myid or simply do the Upgrade option.
>
>Technically, selecting Upgrade from the FC4 installation program will not 
>erase your existing data.  You want a full install to do that.  Keeping in 
>mind it works great if your /home is a separate partition.
>
>What I always do before a new install or upgrade of Fedora on my box is 
>make printouts of key files.
>
>/etc/fstab
>/etc/grub.conf
>/etc/X11/xorg.conf
>
>A partition layout:
>
>[~]$ sudo /sbin/fdisk -l /dev/hda
>
>Disk /dev/hda: 27.3 GB, 27373731840 bytes
>255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3328 cylinders
>Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
>
>   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
>/dev/hda1   *           1          10       80293+  83  Linux
>/dev/hda2              11        1315    10482412+  83  Linux
>/dev/hda3            1316        1413      787185   82  Linux swap
>/dev/hda4            1414        3328    15382237+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
>/dev/hda5            1414        3328    15382206   83  Linux
>
>including the df -h (remember, fstab has LABEL=/home):
>
>[~]$ df -h
>Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
>/dev/hda2             9.9G  5.1G  4.3G  55% /
>/dev/hda1              76M  8.5M   64M  12% /boot
>none                  252M     0  252M   0% /dev/shm
>/dev/hda5              15G   13G  910M  94% /home
>
>
>Then I highlight the partitions I need to keep, and start the upgrade.
>
>
>After the install, I usually move my home dir ('/home/myid') to a saved 
>version ('/home/SAVED_myid'), login, them move over program settings for 
>each program, firefox, thunderbird, grip, etc I use.
>
>When I'm done, I generally get rid of the old SAVED_myid version.  Think 
>of it as a 'cleaning house' from all the stuff I tried but don't use 
>anymore.  This allows me to start fresh with Gnome on a new version, and 
>only bring over stuff I need.  It is a lot of work, but I'm not left 
>guessing what might be lying around that I don't want to troubleshoot.
>
>At work, I simply do an upgrade and leave my homedir intact.
>  
>I tend to experiment with many different apps at home, and don't 
>necessarily need the 'cruft' lying around.
>
>Either way works great in my experience.
>
>
>I do have all the FC4 ISO cd and dvd images available.
>
>Jon L.
>
>  
>




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