On Mon, 19 Nov 2018 16:15:05 +0000 (UTC)
Beartooth <Beartooth(a)comcast.net> wrote:
There isn't really a question here, but I'm going to assume you want to
know what to do with your failed system.
I never put F28 onto my wife's machine, because I had too
much trouble with it on mine. I didn't mean to now, except
temporarily. I ran dnf upgrade, then did the dnf system upgrade,
giving the version to upgrade to as 28.
Then I did the special system-upgrade reboot -- and it hung.
I tried rebooting several times, but succeeded only in getting it to
hang on a different error message, one that it now gets every time.
That message is long, complex, and ambiguous in several
places, at least to the uninitiated. It begins by saying something
like "You are now in emergency mode." Then it talks about logging in
a/o giving commands, some as root. Finally it says you can try to
continue by hitting ^D; I've done that, and it tries to reboot but
hangs with what seems the same message.
The boot process failed because it failed to find the root or
boot partition, probably. That place you are at is called the dracut
shell, and if you are not technically inclined you are not going to be
able to recover from there (at least without a lot of coaching). I'm
probably not qualified to give that coaching since it has been years
since that happened to me.
I tried using UCBD, which did boot; but it was way over my
head. So I tried a few options like boot and install; no joy. All the
things I thought might help (essentially the ones not meant for
exploring hardware) did me no good. I did try its supergrub2disk,
which I've used before on its own, but got nowhere with that, either.
I don't know this, but it sounds like you are flailing.
That PC is now running a live medium of F29. I could tell it
to install to hard drive; or I could burn a medium for netinstall.
(She does say she has not done significant work on her important data
since the backups I made before upgrading her to F27.)
Yes, this is what I recommend you do. Easiest for a non-technical person.
From the F29 live media you can mount the hard drive under a mount
point and back up everything you want.
Do an /sbin/blkid to see the UUID for the hard drive (or dev identifier)
Then create a mount point under mount,
mkdir /mnt/myf28
for example.
Then mount the hard drive at that point, (see man mount), and cd into
the directories you want to backup and back them up the usual way.
Once all the personal stuff you want to save is done, just install the
f29 live image on the hard drive. If you keep separate data
partitions, make sure you leave them untouched by the install process.
That's just a rough guide, you should be able to flesh it out with
searches on the web or the man pages. Or by asking further questions
here.