Plans for upgrading to woody & ditching HD

[Andrew Perrin <clists@perrin.socsci.unc.edu>]

Greetings-

I have a machine currently running potato. It has four IDE drives in
it. /dev/hda does nothing important; it's an old (probably 1993 or
1994) 1.2G whose sole role in life at this point is to have an MBR with
LILO to boot DOS, NT, or (99% of the time) Debian.

That drive is quickly dying, and when it dies it brings down the IDE bus
and therefore the system. So I need to get rid of it. I'd like to upgrade
to woody at the same time.  Here's my plan; any comments or advice are
welcome.

1.) Back up /etc to somewhere safe
2.) Edit /etc/fstab:
  change all references to /dev/hdb* to /dev/hda*
  remove references to (unused) filesystems on what is now /dev/hda
  change references to /dev/hdc* to /dev/hdb*
  change references to /dev/hdd* to /dev/hdc*
(cdrom and zip drive are SCSI so not relevant to this process)
3.) Edit /etc/lilo.conf to point linux to /dev/hda instead of /dev/hdb
4.) Write /etc/lilo.conf to the MBR of the current /dev/hdb (about to
become /dev/hda). THIS IS THE STEP I DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO.
5.) Power down
6.) Remove current /dev/hda
7.) Rejumper current /dev/hdb as master
8.) Power back up

---At this point I *hope* to have the old system (potato) up and running
without the dead disk.---

9.) edit /etc/apt/sources.list to point to testing instead of stable
(should I use woody instead of testing?)
10.) apt-get update
11.) apt-get install apt apt-utils
12.) apt-get dist-upgrade

What, if anything, am I missing, or should I be worried about?

Thanks.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew J Perrin - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
clists@perrin.socsci.unc.edu * andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu



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