On Sun, Jul 13, 2014 at 12:01 PM, Timothy Murphy <gayleard@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I'm having trouble installing CentOS-7 on my HP MicroServer.
> I've tried with KDE LiveCD and Netinstall (both on USB sticks),
> and now I'm going to try with the DVD ISO.
>
> But I want to be quite sure I can return to CentOS-6.5
> if things go wrong, so I'm wondering what precisely I need to copy
> (eg the MBR and a bit more) so that I could get back to things as they were.
> Is this documented anywhere?
>
> Actually, both failed installations did give a boot menu
> including the old 6.5 system,
> but I'm afraid sometime this might not work,
> and I will be cut off from the world.
If you don't overwrite your old partitions, you should be able to boot
from a 6.x install iso in 'rescue' mode. But, I'd recommend an
emergency backup made either with clonezilla-live (a bootable CD) or
the 'rear' package from EPEL just on general principles. Clonezilla
does a menu-drive disk-image backup that it can put on a local disk,
or network share via nfs/samba/sshfs, and knows enough about
filesystems to just save the used blocks. Rear builds a bootable iso
(using your own system tools) with a script to recreate your
partitions and filesystems from bare metal and restore a tar image
onto it. Actually the backup method is somewhat pluggable, but tar
to an NFS server is the only one I've used. It is probably possible
to use a USB drive of if the system is small enough, include it on the
bootable iso. A big advantage of 'rear' is that you don't have to
take the system down to create a backup - and it is possible but a bit
of work to change the filesystem layout before the restore.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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