upgrading an old system

[steve%prd.co.uk@localhost (Steve Blinkhorn)]

I have two servers I have just retrieved from their regular home in a
data centre some distance away.  (Less tha opportune interventions by
the staff there meant they would not accept remote logins).

While I have them here I want to upgrade them to 7.0 (i386).   But one is
2.0, the other 3.0 at present.

It looks as though they will not boot from their USB ports, the
CD-ROM drives seem not to be DVD-compatible (and I'm  not sure I can
find any blank CD-ROM disks).   They have floppy drives, but I'm not
sure I have a working floppy drive on a working machine any more.

I have both the machines running normally, and I've backed up everything I
need to keep.   Is there a way of upgrading these machines by placing
initial installation files on their hard drives, say in a /altboot
directory, bootin from there and doing the rest over NFS or FTP?   I
have to do an install because I think both machines need new boot
blocks to even boot newer releases.   I also need to change the disk
layout to add more swap space and create /tmp on disk rather than in an
MFS.

I am under time pressure because these two machines form the backbone
of live 24/7/365 services, now being run on VPSs in their absence.

-- 
Steve Blinkhorn <steve%prd.co.uk@localhost>