F16 => F17 PreUpgrade Invalid Device ID Dumps to dracut Shell

[bhanks at bhanks.net]

I delayed the upgrade of my main Fedora machine after reading all of 
the issues that were happening with the preupgrade process.  I've done 
several fresh installs without issue, so I suspected that my delay would 
have provided enough time for the preupgrade issues to be worked out.  I 
was wrong.

I started with a fully updated F16 box and ran preupgrade.  There were 
video issues during the process, but after a long wait with a blank 
screen it rebooted.  When booting into the F17 kernel it dies on an 
invalid device id error and drops to a dracut shell.  I've validated 
that the device id in question is in fact correct.  I've tried to 
replace that device id with the actual device name (/dev/sda3).  I've 
tried to run grub2-mkconfig and I've tried to reinstall grub2.  Nothing 
works.  Thankfully, I am able to boot into an F16 kernel (with some 
errors), so the machine it completely dead.

I've searched all over and not found any reference to this exact 
problem.  Any ideas?

I'm really trying to avoid doing a fresh install because I don't want 
to recreated the installation and config of my entire machine, servers, 
and dev environment.  Any insight would be greatly appreciated.


Thanks,
Brian Hanks