Thanks. Ignore most of my previous reply. Yes I didn't install this machine initially so have no clue how the HPinitrd was built. Luckily I found some leftovers from that ~/root including a rhel3 HP280 install doc. I won't attempt to upgrade the kernel or install a new one without having access to the console. The machine is physically 1500 km away :-) So not touching the kernel but upgrade the rest of the system will cause no harm ? A detailed description in the smartfaq on how to migrate RHEL3 to CentOS 3 is using "yum update" instead of "yum upgrade" However the man page says that "upgrade" is deprecated and may be removed in the future .. thanks, Peter Karanbir Singh wrote: > Peter van Eck wrote: > >> The current smp kernel 2.4.21-9smp is booting with a HPinitrd image. >> Mostlikely generated with the HP proliant Service Pack for RHEL 3. >> >> Now if I migrate this system to CentOS 3 and a new kernel will be >> installed ,will that work ? Does the new centOS kernel use the same >> config as the current RHEL kernel ? > > > No it wont work, you will need to rebuild the initrd and the > required kernel moduls first. > >> I don't have access to the console so can't take too much risk here.. > > > One way to work around the situation would be to first exclude the > kernel and upgrade everything else to the latest CentOS Release. > Then install the new kernel with a "yum install > {kenel-version-release.arch}" ( dont upgrade the kernel, just > install the new one - multiple kernels can co-exist with no issues > ). Once you have installed the new kernel, check your boot loader > configs to see what is the 'default' kernel. You might want to leave > default kernel on the old one - till you can get the new initrd in > place. > > It would, however, make sense to try find out how the original > initrd was built and what, if any, new modules need to be created > first. >