Is there a way to just upgrade the boot partition from RedHat 4 to RedHat 5 on a server? We have a Dell PowerEdge R900 currently running RedHat 4 and we need to upgrade it to RedHat 5. However, we have some large partitions that we really don't want touched. So is there a way to just upgrade the /boot partition? From what I read on the RedHat site, they do not support upgrading - that you have to do a clean install. We would like to avoid this, if possible. Any advice and/or suggestions are welcome. Thank you!

Here's is our current setup (df -k):
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
50412228 933304 46918108 2% /
/dev/sda1 101086 72131 23736 76% /boot
none 4151672 0 4151672 0% /dev/shm
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol05
888012948 704245788 138658732 84% /exlibris
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol04
68537896 1582012 63474284 3% /home
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol03
5063712 42892 4763592 1% /tmp
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol02
134077736 2047924 125218984 2% /usr

Jamen McGranahan
Systems Services Librarian

In your system, a fresh instal of RHEL 5 will not affect any partitions besides /, /boot and /usr. If done right of course. No need to wipe out your data partitions, but since you should have a backup anyways that wouldn't be a problem, wouldn't it?