Preupgrade and F12: boot partition is too small

[DZ*]

It appears that the default boot partition is too small for F12 preupgrade:
https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/270

Did anyone try to see if enough space is freed by following these steps? :
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PreUpg...ace_in_.2Fboot

Namely,
1. Leave only 1 kernel
2. tune2fs -r 0 /dev/xxx
3. remove /boot/efi and splash.xpm.gz

"preupgrade now requires at least 167MB" means more space could be needed,
and I'm unclear if the above is sufficient.

[benvon]

After doing all these steps, I was finally able to get the preupgrade to work.

[mennamorato]

After a lot of frustration with this... i removed the logical volume partitions that F11 created when i had installed that. Then created custom partition with a larger /boot (1G since i have tons of space what the heck...). Then preupgrade worked - almost ... now im hung up at the very end of "verifying everything" and some traceback and error messages come up about the repository, even though i have a /boot/upgrade/install.img and kernel.

[DZ*]

Originally Posted by benvon

After doing all these steps, I was finally able to get the preupgrade to work.

Was it a 32 or 64 bit upgrade?
I'm guessing that 64 bit files might be larger...

[mennamorato]

64-bit, good point

Edit: now..how do i get past the very last hurdle? i should be able to do a 'hard disk install' now right ?

[benvon]

Yes, 64-bit.

[mennamorato]

to fix this btw...after making the boot dir larger i did a complete sw upgrade on F11 then finally "preugrade" to F12 worked fine..

[markdk]

Seems to be a common prob. I guess the Fedora default filesystem layout does not take into account that anyone may actually want to upgrade using preupgrade, or I suppose any other method other than a clean install.

On my FC11 machine as noted in earlier posts deleting everything not required to boot gives just enough space to preupgrade. Eventually worked fine.

My poor FC10 machine didn't have a chance, /boot was smaller there.
I got round it with lots of google'ing to figure out how to use resize2fs, lvresize, pvresize, parted to zap the /dev/sdaN to a smaller size etc, then using clonezilla to back up the smaller partition assigned to LVM.
Then deleting all LVMs, using parted and resize2fs to enlarge /boot and create a new /dev/sdaN to restore into, and restoring the smaller LVM partition backed up by clonezilla. Then mucking about to grow the restored LVM pv/vg/lv to use what was left again.

Lots of hassle. Went and redid the exercise on the FC11->FC12 machine where preupgrade worked as well to avoid probs when FC13,14,15... appears. All my /boot filesystems are 2Gb+ now.

It was a lot of hassle; don't know why the default filesystem layouts make /boot too small to use preupgrade, but if the defaults were a decent size to start with nobody would have probs using preupgrade.

Would be nice if the default filesystem layout on fresh installs didn't use the smallest space needed for /boot for that Fedora version.
I guess going forward if anyone knows anybody about to start a fresh install just shout at them not to use the defaults for filesystem layout and make /boot at least a couple of GB.

[alexuk]

Originally Posted by markdk

I guess going forward if anyone knows anybody about to start a fresh install just shout at them not to use the defaults for filesystem layout and make /boot at least a couple of GB.

I think F12 makes /boot approx 500MB

[mennamorato]

YES exactly...tell people to not use default sizes and make it much bigger !