preupgrade FC16-FC17 fails - grub, intird + misc!

[alexuk]

What a nightmare.
First anaconda hanged on a supposedly old moodle package that could not be updated. I managed to wipe the old package and let it skipt it after a few tries. This enabled anaconda to finish. First reboot I get kernel panic with missing kernel.
With the rescue boot I looked at the generated grub and the initrd line is missing. I looked in boot and the initrams file itself is missing!
The old FC16s no longer boot. Any advice?

Edited to add: I tried rescue, chroot /mnt/sysimage, then grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg but the generated grub file does not have the relevant initrd call.

[alexuk]

I've made an appropriate initrams with dracut and remade the grub's confs. The system does begin to boot but half way through the install I get

ata_id[225]: unable to opean '$devnode
...
dract Warning: Unable to process initqueue
dracut Warning: /dev/mapper/vg..root does not exist

Dropping to debug shell

Any hints?

[darkpoison]

I am in the same situation and searching for several days with no success

[alexuk]

You can make the system boot by using the dracut shell (see help on dracut, essentially scanning and setting up the logical volume). With the system up I've tried all sorts of things including rebuilding the kernels, the grub.cfg and the intritrams. Eventually I gave up and reisntalled FC17 from scratch.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_t...e_dracut_shell

I've seen a great deal of difficult preupgrades over the years. This is the worst of all. I appreciate preupgrade is not the preferred upgrade path; but it's so poor it should just be removed as an option.

[jnoake]

Originally Posted by alexuk

I've made an appropriate initrams with dracut and remade the grub's confs. The system does begin to boot but half way through the install I get

ata_id[225]: unable to opean '$devnode
...
dract Warning: Unable to process initqueue
dracut Warning: /dev/mapper/vg..root does not exist

Dropping to debug shell

Any hints?

I have this exactly after a preupgrade from 15 to 17 on an external USB harddisk.
If anybody has suggestions, I am still interested in a solution?...

I have no problem accessing the disk from another installation. From what I can see, dracut seems to have dropped the ball in a minor way to terminal effect. I imagine that $devnode should resolve to /dev but I have no idea where to start looking for this.