Upgrading F14->F15 on x64 - system freezes during cleanup - rescued

[Max Pyziur]

On Sat, 19 May 2012, Christopher Svanefalk wrote:

> On Sat, May 19, 2012 at 10:44 PM, Max Pyziur <pyz at brama.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, 19 May 2012, David wrote:
>>
>>> On 5/19/2012 10:08 AM, Max Pyziur wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Greeting,
>>>>
>>>> I'm upgrading from F14 to F15 on an x64 system. (I've been doing so
>>>> successfully since 2007).
>>>>
>>>> However, on this go-around the screen went blank during "clean-up" and
>>>> the mouse became unresponsive.
>>>>
>>>> Any suggestions would be appreciated.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks.
>>>>
>>>> Max Pyziur
>>>> pyz at brama.com
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Max,
>>>
>>> Why did you update from a long time EOL release of Fedora, Fedora 14,
>>> to another long time EOL release of Fedora, Fedora 15?
>>
>>
>> Because I wanted to proceed sequentially.
>>
>> My current dilemma is trying to rescue the upgrade on this machine. Can you
>> help with that?
>
> I take it you are not able to boot into the half-ready system? That is
> what allowed me to save my install when it happened.

Correct. I wasn't able to reboot into the system.

Consequently, I used the rescue mode (3rd item) on the installation cd.

Once booted, all of the existing partitions were mounted on /mnt/sysimage.

Per instructions from several sources, including the Fedora Project Wiki, 
you chroot /mnt/sysimage in order to make it possible to rebuild the 
system. With that, you have access to ftp, ssh, and, most importantly, 
rpm and yum.

The rpm db files needed to be rebuilt several times of the course of the 
correction:
rm /var/lib/rpm/__db*.0*
rpm -vv --rebuilddb

Even though the Install F15 DVD was mounted, there was no access to the 
RPMs on the disk. So, I created a directory (mkdir 
/var/F15PackagesGoHere), mounted another F15 Installation DVD on another 
machine, and ftp'd Packages/RPMs over to the new directory.

The process involved using "yum upgrade" to identify duplicate packages 
(an F14 and F15 version of the same package) or missing dependencies.

In the case of duped F14/F15 packages, I cd'd to the 
/var/F15PackagesGoHere directory) and ran
rpm -Uvh --force some.F15.rpm

In that way, the binaries/rpms got upgraded to F15 versions.

Numerous times after a somewhat stable period, there were kernel panics; 
the error messages indicated problems being in graphics mode (if so, I 
don't how to invoke an 80x24 screen). This required a reboot, followed by 
some combination of yum-complete-transaction or even an rpm -vv 
--rebuilddb.

All of this took a very long time.

In the end, I now have a useable F15 x64 desktop, and lingering concerns 
about subsequent upgrades, wanting to avoid this sort of a mess.

For the upgrades to F16 (soon) and F17 (eventually), should I try again to 
use the DVD for upgrading or use preupgrade over a 2nd generation DSL line 
(3MBps download speed).


>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>> MP
>> pyz at brama.com

Reporting at the scene,

MP
pyz at brama.com