F8 -> F9 Preupgrade Issues

[Dave Cross]

On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 11:29 PM, Michael Wiktowy
<michael.wiktowy at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 5:07 PM, Dave Cross <davorg at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I've just spent a few hours trying to upgrade from F8 to F9 using
>> preupgrade. It still hasn't worked and I no longer have a working
>> Linux installation. I'm typing this on Windows. Here's my story.
>>
>> I ran preupgrade yesterday and downloaded all of the required RPMs (or
>> so I thought). This evening I booted into the installation procedure.
>>
>> The first problem was that the path for the stage 2 image was wrong. I
>> had to reboot into my old Fedora installation and edit the grub.conf
>> to add a slash to the front of the path. It was:
>>
>>  stage2=hd:sda6:boot/upgrade/stage2.img
>>
>> And I changed it to:
>>
>>  stage2=hd:sda6:/boot/upgrade/stage2.img
>>
>> I see from other messages here that this is quite a common issue.
>
> It seems to do that when boot is not a separate partition from root. I
> did an upgrade on two systems now: one worked and one had that issue
> and that was the main difference.
>
>> Unless anyone has any better suggestions.
>
> Rather than downloading the LiveCD, all you need might be the rescue ISO image.

Is there a rescue ISO for F9? I haven't seen a reference to one anywhere.

> - download the missing kernel rpm and stick on some media that you can
> mount from Linux.

Got that.

> - download the much smaller rescue ISO image, burn that, boot to it

Looking for that.

> - chroot to the partition it suggests your root filesystems is on
> - do an rpm -i kernel... on the missing kernel package that you
> previously downloaded
>
> If that wasn't the only missing rpm, the path to recovery might be
> simplest to do normal upgrade via DVD.

There's another problem. As I've mentioned in a couple of other
discussions. My laptop is incapable of booting any Fedora installation
CDs and DVDs since F7. If I could boot the installation DVD then I'd
just do that. I tried the Live CD yesterday and that didn't boot
either. I doubt that the rescue CD will either.

I've just created a USB stick with the Live CD on. I'll try to boot from that.

Otherwise, I really can't think of any other approach. I really like
the preupgrade idea as it was going to enable me to do a (non-yum)
upgrade without the problem of booting from the installation media. I
didn't think it would stop my system from booting :-(

Dave...