Restoring from backup

[chrise00]

Hi

I bought a machine, installed centos 5.5 32 bit from an odisk supplied DVD , created an oracle account, and loaded up Oracle Fusion Middleware and configured it all, took a backup of everything as a tar excluding /mnt, /proc and /tmp. Before loading Oracle I had to get updated packages for gcc, db-compat etc to meet Oracle preinstall requirements.

Machine died a week later. (You get what you pay for)

So I am getting a new box locally to replace it (Asus m/b but different type).

I plan on reinstalling centos 5.5 32 bit from the same DVD and do recommended system updates after the installation as I did before but then I have a choice.

I can carry on and get oracle required package updates as I did before, and then restore the /home/oracle and other directories from the tar OR skip the required package updates and restore all the other directories /usr, /sbin etc.

Is there a recommendation as to which is likely to work best?

Thanks

Christian

[Rubberman]

Since you didn't use something like Clonezilla to clone your old system, I would recommend doing the complete installation, running 'yum update', and then update your /home and other directories. That will take longer, but since you have a bit more experience with the system now you might find that there are some configuration issues you might want to alter. Also, at this point, if your processor supports 64-bit operations, you might want to install the x86_64 version of CentOS as well as Oracle. I've been running both myself happily for some time.