CentOS Bootstrap

CentOS 6

This way is been suggested for building a container image from your current centos system.

In my case, I need to remote upgrade a running centos6 system to a new clean centos7 on a test vps, without the need of opening the vnc console, attaching a new ISO etc etc.

I am rather lucky as I have a clean extra partition to this vps, so I will follow the below process to remote install a new clean CentOS 7 to this partition. Then add a new grub entry and boot into this partition.

Current OS

# cat /etc/redhat-release
CentOS release 6.9 (Final)

Format partition

format & mount the partition:

 mkfs.ext4 -L rootfs /dev/vda5
 mount /dev/vda5 /mnt/

InstallRoot

Type:

# yum -y groupinstall "Base" --releasever 7 --installroot /mnt/ --nogpgcheck

Test

test it, when finished:

mount --bind /dev/  /mnt/dev/
mount --bind /sys/  /mnt/sys/
mount --bind /proc/ /mnt/proc/

chroot /mnt/

bash-4.2#  cat /etc/redhat-release
CentOS Linux release 7.5.1804 (Core)

It works!

Root Password

inside chroot enviroment:

bash-4.2# passwd
Changing password for user root.
New password:
Retype new password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.

bash-4.2# exit

Grub

adding the new grub entry for CentOS 7

title CentOS 7
        root (hd0,4)
        kernel /boot/vmlinuz-3.10.0-862.2.3.el7.x86_64 root=/dev/vda5 ro rhgb LANG=en_US.UTF-8
        initrd /boot/initramfs-3.10.0-862.2.3.el7.x86_64.img

by changing the default boot entry from 0 to 1 :

default=0

to

default=1

our system will boot into centos7 when reboot!