Yet another Fedora 15 to 16 preupgrade reboot problem

[kapanala]

Although I have a single-boot system (on an HP Proliant microserver), I appear to be getting the preupgrade symptoms normally associated with dual-boot systems.

After running preupgrade, when I reboot, all I get is Fedora 15 back again.

/boot/grub/menu.lst does not appear to be the file that grub is using, because preupgrade has updated that file for the upgrade. The first entry is:

title Upgrade to Fedora 16 (Verne)
kernel /upgrade/vmlinuz preupgrade repo=hd::/var/cache/yum/preupgrade ks=hd:UUID=5e5d56d2-b685-4ec1-9744-1f6935045c01:/upgrade/ks.cfg
initrd /upgrade/initrd.img

The system installation is slightly strange, because the system disk is the fifth disk and was originally installed before sda to sdd were installed. I believe I installed the Fedora 15 before installing the other drives with the system disk in that position. (This is because I moved the low-capacity drive that came with the system into the optical drive bay, so that the higher power-consumption 2TB drives could sit in an area with plenty of cooling).

The mtab entry for /boot is:
/dev/sde1 /boot ext4 rw,relatime,user_xattr,barrier=1,data=ordered 0 0

I want to understand precisely what I am doing before proceeding. I prefer to delay the upgrade over risking a non-bootable system.

My first initial question is "How do I find and edit the menu.lst that grub is actually using?".

Kapanala

[kapanala]

Well, I've managed to answer the question; /boot/grub/menu.lst is the correct file. For some reason I am having two problems:

The grub menu (which I enabled by commenting out hiddenmenu) just flashes into view, but does not stay on the screen. I suspect that this may be an issue with the HP remote administration card.

I get an error:
[ 1.936138] APEI: Can not request iomem region <00000000dffc21ea-00000000dffc21ec> for GARs.
flashing on the screen immediately before Fedora 15 reboots, clearly ignoring the upgrade menu entry. I had to take a video and press pause on replay in order to read the message.

Does this error message have anything to do with the upgrade reboot not working?

[SlowJet]

Try the ESC keyy as the grub boot comes up. Press esc key several times.
The kernel menu list shold stay on the screen, with the default selected.

Could be this problem?

# rpm -q grub grub2
package grub is not installed
grub2-1.99-13.fc16.2.i686

SJ

[kapanala]

Dear SlowJet,

Thank you for your reply.

Pressing escape doesn't appear to have any effect until F15 starts up (when ESC causes it to switch from the horizontal progress bar to startup messages).

$ rpm -q grub grub2
grub-0.97-71.fc15.x86_64
package grub2 is not installed

which is what I would expect before the F16 upgrade actually happens.

STOP PRESS!

Just found the issue with the menu---the timeout was set to 0, timeout 10 keeps the menu up. With most systems I work with, setting a timeout to 0 disables the timeout!

For some reason default is 1, which reboots F15 rather than booting the upgrade.

However, selecting the upgrade for booting just seems to hang.

I may have to do a fresh f16 install. I am beginning to understand how to control the booting just in time for it to change completely for grub2.

Kapanala