When you do any upgrade its always important to make a backup of critical system files along with the user space. If you have any special daemons running make sure to backup the config files for those as well. From 4 to 4 there were some base level changes, so you may have to do a bit of tweaking, but probably not much. When you reboot make sure the grub config loads the newest kernel, so the highest number. I'm assuming your probably running ext3, so you should be fine.
When you think of "upgrading" a linux system, don't think of it in terms of a windows desktop like upgrade, but more like a bunch of updates put together. Yes, there were some significant changes in RHEL/SL 5, but not really any earth-shatering stuff. If you ever look at the iso files once they are mounted, all you will see is a bunch of RPM files. The "upgrade" will install these RPM files, and any necessary dependencies. Many of them will simply be newer versions of files you already have. If there are new files, or some older files that will no longer be used, your system will just take more hard drive space then a clean install would. If an RPM creates a new configuration file, the original should still be there as well.
Off the top of my head I can't think of any system specific applications that had major configuration file changes between SL 4 and 5. The way your network interfaces are handled will change in 5.4, so if you made any changes to the ifcfg-eth files you will may have to modify the corresponding network service files.
Good luck!
On Dec 8, 2009, at 10:05 PM, g wrote:
> [log in to unmask] wrote:
>> I am running Scientific Linux 4.3 and I want to upgrade to the latest
>> version 5.4. Now, I have downloaded the two .iso files. If I install these,
>> will I be able to keep my existing file system, or will the volume in my
>> hard drive be erased, and hence I will have to save my programs and files
>> somewhere else.
>
> if you select *upgrade*, it _should_ be go well.
>
> have a look at;
> https://www.scientificlinux.org/documentation/howto/upgrade.5x
>
>> In addition, what else can go wrong when doing this? (I will not have a
>> problem with insufficient disk space.
>
> nothing that i am aware of. in fact, other than time frame, for me, it was as
> simple and smooth as doing a yum update.
>
>
> while i am at it, my thanks to scientific linux team for all their work in
> making upgrade so easy and trouble free.
>
> i would have said so sooner, but i have been busy rebuilding 2 fedora systems
> and '/home' in this box and one other, when i ran an update, and tried to
> upgrade them from f11 to f12.
>
> system got trash in that it clobbered superblock on 3 hard drives along with
> trashing hard drives to force me to rebuild system from blocks of what i found
> in fsck.ext3 in recover mode.
>
> i did have backups that made '/home' recover easier, but there where several
> bad backup dvd's that checked good when they were made.
>
>
> to that end, be sure that you back your system and '/home' and verify backups
> before you do any upgrade. regardless of what distrib it is.
>
> hth.
>
> later.
>
> --
>
> peace out.
>
> tc,hago.
>
> g
> .
>
> ****
> in a free world without fences, who needs gates.
> **
> help microsoft stamp out piracy - give linux to a friend today.
> **
> to mess up a linux box, you need to work at it.
> to mess up an ms windows box, you just need to *look* at it.
> **
> learn linux:
> 'Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition' http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html
> 'The Linux Documentation Project' http://www.tldp.org/
> 'LDP HOWTO-index' http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX/index.html
> 'HowtoForge' http://howtoforge.com/
> ****
>
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