[K12OSN] Need advice on recovering from failed boot disk

[David Hopkins]

On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 11:28 AM, Carl Keil <carl at snarlnet.com> wrote:
> Thanks for helping me.
>
> So, I tried the dd command, twice and then tried CloneZilla.  Twice.  And
> the failing drive just kept throwing more and more errors.  Even with the
> "move on after bad sectors" (or whatever it's called exactly) switch
> thrown.  I think I need to give up on the miracle cure.  How was I ever
> going to trust the copied disk anyway?  Wouldn't that just be latent
> problems (half garbled config files, etc.) waiting to happen?
>
> Anyway, now I'm looking for a little more philosophical advice.  I used to
> run k12ltsp on this server, but don't any more.  Now it's a web/samba/mythtv
> box for my home.  If it was you, and your old k12-centos 5.3 box ate it, but
> you had homes, web root, samba shares and your mythtv shows on separate
> drives, (and many complete backups via BackupPC) would you take the
> opportunity to upgrade to centos 5.6 or 6.0 or would you try to get back to
> 5.3 so you didn't break all that stuff via new versions of php, mysql, samba
> (prolly not an issue) and mythtv?   What's the smart move here?  Also, do
> you think there'll be a problem going to 64 bit, when the old install was 32
> bit?  I can't see why that would be an issue since basically I'm restoring
> functionality to content that I saved.   If I go, for example from 32-bit
> Centos 5.3 to 64-bit Centos 6 will I still just be able to restore my /etc
> config files from backup and proceed on my merry way?  Or will I have to go
> into each one and cut and paste relevant sections into new config files with
> differing formats, places on the drive, etc.
>
> Also, How do you tell if your hardware should get a 64 bit centos or not?
> I'm not positive about my system.  I think it's a Pentium D dual core.
> Obviously I'd check for sure before proceeding.  But what's considered the
> minimum CPU that actually works with 64 bit Centos?
>

I would upgrade to 5.6. I just installed a system using CentOS6. It
installs ok but there are a number of changes in how to administer the
system. In my case, I noticed that simple GUI utilities like
system-config-bind-gui and system-config-network are no longer
supported. Also, yumex doesn't seem to work quite right (crashes).  If
you're ok with either letting Network manager automagically set things
or enjoy manually configuring the network interfaces and the DNS zone
info then 6 isn't so bad. However, RHEL/CentOS5 is supported till 2017
(I think) which is quite long enough to build a test system to learn
the in-and-outs of 6 before using it for production.

Sincerely,
Dave Hopkins