A couple of days ago, CentOS 5 came out. On my server machine (I say server, but it doesn’t do a lot at the moment, it’s not even on all the time!), I was running CentOS 4.4, and I was eager to get upgrading.

After about half a day of trying to get the DVD ISO off BitTorrent, and getting 30% of the way through, I gave up and downloaded it off an FTP mirror in a few hours. Why is it I rarely ever have good experiences with BitTorrent?

So yesterday I spent a bit of the day upgrading and migrating all the stuff on there over. First of all, though, there was a 10-year-old hard drive still in that machine, which was basically sitting there and doing nothing. I decided I would unplug it, as all it was doing was killing itself slowly and heating up the box a bit more.

And because it was quite an old hard drive (we have older, but I’m not going to rip them out unless it’s necessary):

10-year-old hard drive Hosted on Zooomr

So I just unplugged that, replugged the cables to make the secondary 160 GB hard drive in there the slave on the IDE 0 channel (rather than sharing with the DVD drive) and then wiped the primary 40 GB drive (bye, Vista RC1) and installed CentOS 5.

And CentOS 5 installation was a breeze.

Maybe I’m just good at configuring Linux, but it was just so easy to do (I kept all my old configuration files as well, so I could refer back to them and set things up how they were before).

I find that kind of stuff fun, believe it or not. 😀

I did that all yesterday, but I didn’t get round to blogging about it until today. 🙂

In case you’re wondering why the 160 GB drive is the secondary one and the 40 GB is primary, and not the other way round, that’s because the master boot record area of the 160 GB drive is completely messed up and decides to delete itself constantly. Not very useful as a boot drive. It’s fine as a data drive, though.