USB installation of Fedora-17

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Sat, 2012-06-09 at 13:11 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Gilboa Davara wrote:
> 
> >>> I think I know what happened.
> >>> Are you sharing boot between F16 and F17 by any chance [1]?
> >>
> >> I am.
> >> I chose custom layout, and gave /dev/sda2 as /boot,
> >> without formatting it.
> >>
> >> Basically, I hoped that this would allow me to run Fedora-16
> >> (which I kept on a different partition)
> >> as an alternative to Fedora-17.
> >>
> >> In fact, when I installed Fedora-17 with netinstall
> >> everything worked fine, and I can boot into F-16 or F-17 or Windows,
> >> as hoped.
> >>
> >> What exactly was my error with the USB stick method?
> >> As I mentioned I had the same problem with the DVD iso
> >> and with the KDE Live CD (both transferred to the USB stick).
> > 
> > F17's  anaconda installer (or actually, the grub configuration
> > builders) barfs on having the same kernel version on both F16 and F17,
> > causing it to select the wrong kernel for F17 (3.3.7-1.fc16.x86_64).
> > This in-order causes Fedora to oops during either startup or shutdown.
> > In my cases, I encountered this bug on 10/11 machines I installed
> > Fedora on (either new install w/ shared boot or [pre-]upgrade).
> > I solved this problem by forcing grub to load the correct kernel
> > during first-boot [1]. Once up, I rebuilt the grub configuration [2].
> 
> Thanks again.
> That certainly sounds like what happened to me,
> as grub seemed seriously confused between F16 and F17.
> 
> I still find grub2 difficult to configure,
> and haven't found an entirely satisfactory HOWTO or similar document.

I had some issues with oopses during shutdown, so after thrashing about
for a while I did the following:

cd /boot
mv grub grub-save
yum reinstall grub2

I conjecture that moving the old grub out of the way may affect how
grub2 installs itself, but for whatever reason it appears to have
worked.

poc