install question

[Dana Holland]

We had a box running 8.0.  We tried to upgrade it to ES 3.0.  Although 
it's running, and the kernel appears to be correct, there are many 
things that are not functioning, and the box still "thinks" that it's at 
8.0.  Upon further research, the official RedHat documentation seems to 
indicate that you can't do an upgrade from 8.0.

When we boot off the CD-ROM, it doesn't give us options to upgrade or 
migrate as I'd seen on previous versions of RH.  Does this sound normal?

And when it gets to the part about disk partitioning, we aren't sure 
whether to choose automatic or manual.  This is a production box - we 
aren't being given more than a couple of hours of downtime to make this 
conversion.  Will the automatic option wipe out what's currently on the box?