[KLUG Members] installing a current version

[Mike Williams]

I have an old (sortof) installation of SuSE 7.1 that I use a house server.  I would like to update everything, which YAST2 (the config / update tool) won't do except as individual packages.  I have downloaded an ISO of the boot disk for SuSE 8.0, which will supposedly boot then get the remaining files from an FTP server, but this doesn't work. Networking starts, but it can't connect to the FTP server even though TCP/IP settings are correct.  

I've also considered converting to Redhat since it seems to do a better job of updating an existing installation.  I have 3 CD's of Redhat 7.3, but seem to be running into partition table problems.  (This is on a different machine so I don't kill a production box.)  On most attempts it takes 10 minutes or so for each partitioning operation (even opening the FDISK screen), and at the end it gives a critical failure that it can't read the partition table.  Anybody want to guess if these are BIOS translation issues or something?  The drive is a 10Gig IBM IDE, and the motherboard is an ASUS super-socket-7 with the ALI chipset.  It has the most current BIOS available, although it's fairly old.

Any suggestions appreciated.

-- 
Mike Williams, knightperson@zuzax.com on 07/16/2002