Shoot me but I've been burning to know this one....
OK so what if I'm a lazy **** and can't be asked to goto the datacentre to do manual installs.
Here goes thanks to this forum I've decided to try some of the newest distros and have been quite impressed to say the least. Think my last installs were in 2001 LOL what the hell if the machines are running who needs an upgrade ?
So now I do want to upgrade but how ?
Example machine 1 in DC :
Runnning Redhat 8 some are on 6.2 :o
What I was thinking was to extract the ubuntu server filesystem onto a spare disk in the machine make all the devices and kernel and then temporarily point LILO to the new disk and filesystem.(LILO without save reverts back to last bootloader if things fail : a power cycle off the power bar will restore the machine to the old disk ie rh 8) .
Is this worth a shot ? Can I do it from a livecd ISO ? or maybe it's safer to create a virtual PC with the live disk and then build a kernel that can boot the created fs ?
I'm open to suggestion other than getting my a$$ down to the DC
----
FYI I'm going down the VMWARE route so far good. I just hope ubuntu writes the bootloader to the correct disk

I'll take a back up of the boot headers just in case