Posted by: Anonymous
[ip: 207.216.167.184]
on November 26, 2008 02:21 AM
It's much safer to do a fresh install to a spare disk partition than it is to perform an upgrade to an existing system. If you upgrade, there may be no way back if something goes wrong. If you install onto a spare partition, your existing system remains completely unchanged, which gives you not only a backout path, but the option of performing the install again with different parameters. Since I've been dismayed to find on several occasions that new versions of a given distro have dropped support for hardware that I happen to require, it's critical to be able to evaluate the installed distro before committing to it.
The trick, of course, is having a spare root partition in the first place, but disk space is abundantly cheap so that issue usually reduces to moving partitions around before performing the install. If you absolutely don't have enough existing disk space, consider deferring the install until you have added a new drive.
Ideally, your system will allocate several partitions for various root filesystems, one very tiny common boot partition, and a common swap partition. In total this will amount to a small fraction of the total drive size. You are then free to set aside the rest of the drive for a shared filesystem to contain applications, home directories, and so on.
When you perform a system install, you must select which partition to use for the root filesystem. Be absolutely sure to leave all other partitions alone. On really critical systems I've gone to the extent of disconnecting all but the root disk drive in order to ensure that the others cannot be modified accidentally.
Operating system and hardware changes are an expected part of the system lifecycle. You can make these changes a lot easier and less risky by partitioning the system away from applications and data.
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Upgrade vs Fresh Install
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 207.216.167.184] on November 26, 2008 02:21 AMThe trick, of course, is having a spare root partition in the first place, but disk space is abundantly cheap so that issue usually reduces to moving partitions around before performing the install. If you absolutely don't have enough existing disk space, consider deferring the install until you have added a new drive.
Ideally, your system will allocate several partitions for various root filesystems, one very tiny common boot partition, and a common swap partition. In total this will amount to a small fraction of the total drive size. You are then free to set aside the rest of the drive for a shared filesystem to contain applications, home directories, and so on.
When you perform a system install, you must select which partition to use for the root filesystem. Be absolutely sure to leave all other partitions alone. On really critical systems I've gone to the extent of disconnecting all but the root disk drive in order to ensure that the others cannot be modified accidentally.
Operating system and hardware changes are an expected part of the system lifecycle. You can make these changes a lot easier and less risky by partitioning the system away from applications and data.
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