upgrade F12 with small raid1 boot partition

[Robert Arkiletian]

On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 8:28 PM, Robert Arkiletian <robark at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 12:44 PM, Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> wrote:
>> On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 09:49:21 -0800,
>>  Robert Arkiletian <robark at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Going from F12 to F14
>>> 200MB /boot partition (software raid1)
>>> I know Preupgrade won't work as /boot is too small.
>>> Can I use an F14 netinstall cd with Anaconda to upgrade or does that
>>> also require a larger /boot partition?
>>
>> You should be able to use yum to do the upgrade. You'll probably need to
>> handle a few quirks by hand. I have kitchen sync installs including some
>> stuff from rpmfusion and I usually need to handle a few packages blocking
>> upgrades of other packages. If you have a default install and are not
>> using third party repos or one off packages, the upgrade may just work.
>> There were a few release transitions that had special problems (e.g. there
>> was one where the rpm format changed), but f12-f14 was long enough ago,
>> that I don't remember if either of those was special. If so you may need
>> to go from f12 to f13 and then to f14.
>>
>> As a side note, F14 is losing support in less than a month. It may make
>> more sense to backup /home and /etc and do a fresh install of f16, restore
>> /home and look to see if any of your change in /etc need to be ported.
>> Doing that would possibly be faster than a series of upgrades.
>>
>
>
> Here is a question.
> Currently got /boot as a separate raided partition. What if I boot
> into linux rescue mode with install cd and copy /boot dir to the /
> partition. Essentially removing the separate /boot partition. Then
> edit
>
> /etc/fstab          (remove /boot partition mount)
> /boot/grub/grub.conf
>
> to point to the right partition. Then re-install grub to the mbr.  Do
> I also need to rebuild my initrd image too?
>
> It should reboot fine correct?
>
> I don't really care about losing use of that 200MB array. It's so
> small. Shouldn't I be able to use preupgrade then without issue?

Oh Oh. I forgot. My / is ext4. F12 can't boot off ext4 filesystem. But
I know F14 *can*. Hmm.

So if I go ahead with this plan to get rid of my /boot partition, I
won't be able to boot back into F12 to run preupgrade.  AAHH! This is
frustrating.

What will happen if I just copy /boot to /boot2 in / partition.
Then change

/etc/fstab

and

rename /boot to /boot1  (original boot dir)
rename /boot2 to /boot  (new boot dir)

fix  the new grub.conf to point to the second raid array (not the first)

So my original /boot array is still there but renamed to boot1.
Then I run preupgrade. Will that work?



-- 
Robert Arkiletian
Eric Hamber Secondary, Vancouver, Canada