Upgrading my Debian machine from from Linux kernel 2.4 to Linux kernel 2.6

Important new information I learned:

• One can have LILO boot Linux to single user mode by adding “single” to the end of the image to use e.g. LinuxOLD single — this turns out to be important when…
• Linux 2.6 uses LVM 2 (only), so you need to have upgraded to LVM 1.x BEFORE you fire up 2.6 if important filesystems such as /var are under LVM
• One can specify the boot drive (e.g. /dev/hdc) and partition (e.g./dev/hdc1) from the LILO command line, too. This is very useful when you’re switching between Kernels that do not use the same naming for your disk. The SATA support in 2.6 calls the root drive “sda” and my 2.4 kernel calls it “hdc”. The improved SATA support in 2.6 is part of the reason I’m upgrading, but it’s sure inconvenient when kernel revisions don’t agree on the name of disks
• .. because these names are in both the LILO config and /etc/fstab.
• When the LVM docs say you should remove snapshot volumes before upgrading from LVM1 to LVm2 they are really not kidding and in fact there does not appear to be any way to handle having LVM1 snapshot volumes in LVM2 other than “reboot using LVM1 and remove the snapshot volume” so one may as well do that right off instead of trying to find such a way

It all appears to be working now. Further testing can wait until morning.