another upgrade, another disaster

[Adam Williamson]

On Sat, 2012-06-02 at 20:17 +0200, Andrea Musuruane wrote:

> * 1st attempt:
> Clean upgrade of Fedora 16 from DVD. I left the PC unattended while
> anaconda was upgrading RPM packages. I returned a couple of hours
> later and found a kernel panic. I was too angry to take note of the
> error. The system was no longer able to boot.
> 
> * 2nd attempt:
> New installation of Fedora 17 from DVD. I chose to enable also the F17
> remote repositories including updates - but not updates-testing. I
> left my harddisk layout unchanged (obviously I didn't format my
> /home). All partition were already ext4. I choose the "Software
> development" option. At about 80% of installation anaconda reported
> that there were an error in an RPM package and it couldn't complete
> the installation. The image was correctly checked after downloading
> and brasero reported that the ISO was mastered fine on DVD.
> 
> * 3rd attempt:
> Same as options as the 2nd attempt but this time I chose to enable
> only the F17 remote repositories and I disabled the "Install repo" so
> I presume all the packages were downloaded from the net. At about 85%
> of installation I got a kernel panic - this time I took care of the
> message "unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at
> 0000000000000088".

Frankly, I wouldn't trust your hardware.

The installer uses the same kernel as the installed system, so even if
you get it to install (which apparently you finally did), if you're
getting quasi-random kernel panics, I wouldn't be at all surprised if
you keep getting them on the installed system.

That (and 'inexplicable' errors like failure to read a package on
known-good media) points either to bad hardware or a kernel bug specific
to your system in some way (as we don't have any known general kernel
breakage AFAIK). You'd definitely need to get better data on one of the
crashes (i.e. an actual log, or at least screen capture) and give it to
the kernel team, to look into it.

It may be worth running memtest on the system, first, though.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net