RHEL9 /etc/yum.repos.d directory overlaid with RHEL8 data

I’m in the process of upgrading a RHEL8 system to RHEL9. After what appeared to be a successful in-place upgrade I’ve managed to create a situation where part of my RHEL9 system still thinks it is RHEL8.

Some details: I started with two RHEL8 systems: “linux1Y” and “linux1Z”. linux1Z is an active production system while linux1Y is basically a spare. On linux1Y I performed an in-place upgrade to RHEL9 which appeared to be successful.

My next step was to perform an rsync-based copy of updated data from linux1Z to the newly updated linux1Y. I used the same procedure that was part of a semi-automated process to alternate production workloads between the two systems. An “--exclude-from” file was used to identify the data to be copied. (Some data was unique to a specific system and shouldn’t be part of a general copy operation.)

After the copy completed there were some package issues on linux1Y that needed to be resolved. (References to PHP files, for example.) That was when I started getting error messages from dnf:

Errors during downloading metadata for repository 'rhel-8-for-x86_64-baseos-rpms'

Taking a closer look it seems that the /etc/yum.repos.d directory had been copied from the RHEL8 system, overlaying the RHEL9 repo definitions. I’ve made some efforts to try and re-create the repo definitions, but nothing has worked so far. Issuing the commands:

subscription-manager register --force --username …..
subscription-manager repos –list

just gives me a list of RHEL8 repos.

Help! Am I in an unrecoverable situation? I’m not sure how to proceed at this point. As a last resort I’ll just wipe my hybrid RHEL8/9 system and install RHE9 from scratch. Is there something like Windows’ “repair” function where I can re-install or refresh RHEL9 by updating the metadata identifying the system as RHEL9? Another possibility I’m considering is to create a new, minimal RHEL9 system and try copying from that new system to linux1Y.

For future reference does any documentation exist that identifies files/directories containing system metadata that should not be blindly copied between systems, even at the same level?

Many thanks in advance to any help, pointers and/or suggestions!