On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 12:42:24AM -0600, Benjammin2068 wrote: > SO.... What's the safest thing I could do to protect it when I do the upgrade (which is essentially a fresh install of v8) > > I'm assuming I should: > > * PULL THE DRIVES FROM THE SYSTEM. > It's hard to beat pulling the drives when it comes to "safest thing to do". Also very easy to understand / intuitive way of going about things. Possible alternatives are: - trust the installer to not meddle with unrelated drives ;-) * linux installers usually behave, the main concern is user error - do a chroot install (what Debian calls debootstrap, not sure about CentOS) * you have to set up partitions, filesystems, bootloaders etc. manually - do a virtual (qemu-kvm et al.) install * to a virtual disk, then migrate systems afterwards * pass through a raw physical disk directly, boot on bare metal afterwards I used the latter to upgrade (fresh install) Windows 7 to Windows 10. Completely unfamiliar with MS installer and too lazy to pull drives. Worked out just fine. (All other drives must be partitioned to Linux partition types or Windows won't leave them alone even after install) Preserving /etc/mdadm.conf is optional, unless you have a very special configuration, you can just generate a new one from on-disk metadata, then set MAILADDR and such for monitoring. That said, you should always have backups for everything in any case. Good luck, Andreas Klauer
