Downgrade centos version

Question

I currently have CentOS 5.10 installed in my server.

Is it possible to downgrade it to CentOS 5.5 with out re installing ?

Before you go any further with this, you should think carefully about what you're doing, because there is no unique thing you can call CentOS 5.5 (or indeed 5.10) so it makes very little sense to try to downgrade to it. My answer here explains this more fully, but in short, there is no good reason for what you are trying to do, and a lot of reasons why it's a very bad idea. — MadHatter, Jun 09 '15 at 09:04
my client wants it and I couldnt make him understand and I dont have KVM access to my server so cant install from iso. — user3360140, Jun 09 '15 at 09:12
It will be very painful. You will have to do much of it by hand. It will therefore cost him a lot of money. And at the end of the day, all he'll have is a highly insecure system. Try that. — MadHatter, Jun 09 '15 at 09:15
There is absolutely no way you should ever allow this to happen. If the client asks for it, your job as a professional is to refuse. — Michael Hampton, Jun 09 '15 at 14:29

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 09 '15 at 09:15

I don't have a CentOS test box at hand, but the procedure is documented on Red Hat's support portal https://access.redhat.com/solutions/186763

Ensure that you have a yum repo for that old release configured. Check http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5.5/readme to see it is considered a bad idea to run CentOS 5.5 and where to find such repo's.
Install the correct old kernel for that old minor release,

yum install kernel-<version>
reboot to that kernel version.
And than run a yum downgrade to the release package you want, something like: yum downgrade centos-release-5-5

No personal experience if doing the above will work as expected...

1 Answers1