GOT IT!! Thank you Paul, Rod, Steven and Gideon. I had the old LVM rsync the current homes back overnight. I used parts of most of your points. My 500 students don't hate me any more ;-) I've found that booting to the Control D disk error and unmounting or remounting rw the drives has always been a hassle so I've tattooed: "mount / -o remount,rw" to my forehead... Once in, re-editing fstab is a sintch. As for the LVMs: I used a Centos i368 CD (I was curious because my systems are 64 bit so I used a 32 bit disk...) and booted to linux rescue and NOT letting it mount any drives. From here it was just a matter of "lvm vgrename". Booting the new system up with another newly edited fstab and a mount -a of the new volgroup-newname bla bla bla and the system was ready to rsync back. Thanks a ton, Jim