Installs and upgrades

I installed Ubuntu's Hardy Heron on a replacement machine at home, that seemed to go pretty well and so on Friday I upgraded to the same distro (from Gutsy) on my work laptop - there was one point where it claimed that the download would take 10 hours - we do have a rather fast connection to the internet at work! - but that went pretty smoothly apart from the upgrade installing oodles of games which weren't there before.
So today I decided to go for a few more! To replace a old machine with the new Ubuntu machine - migrating the data and then to do a fresh install of Mandriva 2008.1 on the webserver. All did not go smoothly!

• I pulled the mains cable out of the (switched off) Ubuntu machine to move it across the room and the power circuit board tripped


• I extracted the IDE drive from the old machine so that the new one could use it - easier than copying the data I thought only to discover that the IDE cable in the new box wasn't long enough (it had lots of SATA cables and only one IDE). Wailing and gnashing of teeth and I put it back in the old machine created tar archives of the various home directories and ssh'ed them over

Seemed to go with only slight difficulty, however I then moved upstairs to get the web server done...

• This is the machine that got corrupted last time the power blew, so an install rather than an upgrade! Had 3 cd's of 2008.1, previously the install has read cd 1 followed by cd 2 etc (obviously), in this case it ping-ponged back and forth between the 3 cd's, I think I must have inserted cd 2 six times!


• Booted new OS to discover that grub had not copied over the stuff in the previous MBR (master boot record) - I was intending to gradually migrate over the next few days. Not a problem I thought edit the boot configuration - using drakconf that's pretty simple - so I did and rebooted to try to get back to the old OS - oops!
  

  modprobe: FATAL: Could not load /lib/modules/2.6.17-17mdv/modules.dep

  
  googling suggests the kernel hasn't been properly built!? and this machine rebooted successfully this morning! Tried another slightly older kernel version which was still there.


• Pause, I eventually decide to boot from the old OS install disk and try a rescue - and add the new version to a new MBR built from lilo - no! get some obscure error when trying to rescue the lilo version


• Cut losses go for a swift move to the new!


• Also noted that for some reason neither of blackbox nor fluxbox appeared to be in the 3 cd install (not g++ or mysql..)


• Abbreviating somewhat! Now have email setup (I run imap for the rest of the household) downloading and spamchecking ok, I think apache2 is up again. Imap was a bit tricky for various security reasons - so I won't say too much. Tomorrow to get the newsserver up and running!
  

I hope these permutations prove useful to someone!