[Scottish] Linux installation gotchas

[John Gordon Ollason]

Greetings,

I first installed Redhat 5.2, upgraded to 7.3 painlessly, to Fedora 4 with  
a little more pain. In this time, the installation has become pretty  
scungy with useless software, forgotten hacks, and symbolic links  
scattered about the place.

My system is set up on two scsi disks. The guts on /dev/sda, and /home on  
sdb. I have also installed a USB 500 gbyte drive, divided into 100 gbyte  
partitions. I have backed up /home, .bash_login, .bash_profile, .bashrc,  
/etc/rc.d/local, and all of the packages I downloaded into /usr/src onto  
the USB disk. I am proposing to keep Fedora 4 on sda, and to install  
Fedora 9 on sdb with a view to booting from Fedora 4 and Fedora 9 (at  
least until Fedora 9 is running smoothly when I can clean off Fedora 4 and  
reclaim the storage for data).

A possible nasty would be for /etc/fstab on sda to be trying to access the  
disk partitions on sdb that no longer exist, so I would propose to edit  
out by hand all of the entries pointing to sdb from /etc/fstab on sda.

I did in the distant past run a DOS partition and a linux partition booted  
 from lilo and would intend to do the same with Fedora 4 and Fedora 9. Are  
there any potential gotchas in my plan as described here?

Thanks, in advance, for any advice.

All the best,

John O.