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What in the world happened?
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    What in the world happened?

    I booted in Fedora Linux 13, and was told there was a Fedora 14 upgrade waiting, using preupgrade. I went ahead and let it do the upgrade, and it went through a series of steps and finally told me it was booting Fedora 16. This is a dual boot machine using the Windows boot loader and I got the usual boot interface. I was able to boot Windows normally, but then when I closed it and tried to boot Fedora, it seemed to hang. I tried to boot using a super grub 2 CD I had made, but that failed. I tried all the options. I then tried again to boot and this time my old Fedora 13 system came up.

    Can anyone tell me what may have happened?

    I think I may understand why the Super grub 32 disk failed. If indeed all I had on my disk was Fedora 13, then I didn't have a grub 2 booter.

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    Re: What in the world happened?

    what's the output of 'rpm -qa | grep fc16 | wc -l' ?

    it will be a large number if fedora 16 was installed, if it is small run the same command for fc13

    also check:

    Code:
    cat /etc/redhat-release

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    Re: What in the world happened?

    Quote Originally Posted by Gödel
    what's the output of 'rpm -qa | grep fc16 | wc -l' ?

    it will be a large number if fedora 16 was installed, if it is small run the same command for fc13

    also check:

    Code:
    cat /etc/redhat-release
    rpm -qa | grep fc16
    returns nothing.

    I'm pretty sure there is no Fedora 16 installed. But what happened to the alleged installation done by preupgrade?

    Where does preupgrade normally put the files it downloads?

    I am guessing that something went wrong with the upgrade so it wasn't actually installed. Would there be an error message somewhere indicating what happened?

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    Re: What in the world happened?

    Where does preupgrade normally put the files it downloads?
    In a folder it creates... /boot/upgrade/
    One of the common failures of preupgrade is that the users /boot partition does not have enough free space available to accommodate all the files the preupgrade process attempts to put there. The default /boot partition size for earlier Fedora versions was 200MB. The default size now is 500MB, upped to do away with the problem of not having enough free space in /boot for preupgrade.

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    Re: What in the world happened?

    You would have noticed an upgrade as it takes hours and downloads hundreds of rpms.

    I haven't used preupgrade, I usually upgrade directly via yum since it is the least error prone method

    eg see http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=276026

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    Re: What in the world happened?

    Quote Originally Posted by PabloTwo
    In a folder it creates... /boot/upgrade/
    One of the common failures of preupgrade is that the users /boot partition does not have enough free space available to accommodate all the files the preupgrade process attempts to put there. The default /boot partition size for earlier Fedora versions was 200MB. The default size now is 500MB, upped to do away with the problem of not having enough free space in /boot for preupgrade.
    /boot is about 200 Mb and 86 % is in use, including what is in upgrade. The current size of upgrade is 136,548 K which is divided into three files, the largest being initrd.img, which is about 135.7 Mb.
    I think those three files were left over from a previous try. So, in any case, it doesn't seem as if /boot is large enough.

    ---------- Post added at 11:38 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:36 AM ----------

    Quote Originally Posted by Gödel
    You would have noticed an upgrade as it takes hours and downloads hundreds of rpms.

    I haven't used preupgrade, I usually upgrade directly via yum since it is the least error prone method

    eg see http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=276026
    It did take a couple of hours and it claimed it was downloading hundreds of rpms. But given the space avaialbe, it doesn't seem as if that would be possible. So we return to my original question. What in the world was going on?

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    Re: What in the world happened?

    I've never done a "preupgrade", so I can't be sure, but I would guess the rpm files themselves would download to /var/cache/yum......whatever. I believe the files in /boot/upgrade are what's needed to boot the new "upgraded" ( F16) kernel.

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    Re: What in the world happened?

    Quote Originally Posted by PabloTwo
    I've never done a "preupgrade", so I can't be sure, but I would guess the rpm files themselves would download to /var/cache/yum......whatever. I believe the files in /boot/upgrade are what's needed to boot the new "upgraded" ( F16) kernel.
    You are right. That is where they are.

    Sop the question was what happened next?

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    Re: What in the world happened?

    Quote Originally Posted by leonardevens
    /boot is about 200 Mb and 86 % is in use, including what is in upgrade. The current size of upgrade is 136,548 K which is divided into three files, the largest being initrd.img, which is about 135.7 Mb.
    I think those three files were left over from a previous try. So, in any case, it doesn't seem as if /boot is large enough.

    ---------- Post added at 11:38 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:36 AM ----------



    It did take a couple of hours and it claimed it was downloading hundreds of rpms. But given the space avaialbe, it doesn't seem as if that would be possible. So we return to my original question. What in the world was going on?
    It's possible the install borked after doing the dependency and space requirements check, how much space do you have in your root partition ( "/" mount point )?

    Code:
    df -hT

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    Re: What in the world happened?

    Quote Originally Posted by Gödel
    It's possible the install borked after doing the dependency and space requirements check, how much space do you have in your root partition ( "/" mount point )?

    Code:
    df -hT
    I have 29G with 21G available.

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    Re: What in the world happened?

    that's plenty of space, so the problem is probably with the /boot partition and grub

    see http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to...ll_upon_reboot

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    Re: What in the world happened?

    I'm sorry that you have troubles with preupgrade, especially because I encouraged you to try it.
    Quote Originally Posted by leonardevens
    I booted in Fedora Linux 13, and was told there was a Fedora 14 upgrade waiting, using preupgrade. I went ahead and let it do the upgrade, and it went through a series of steps and finally told me it was booting Fedora 16. This is a dual boot machine using the Windows boot loader and I got the usual boot interface. I was able to boot Windows normally, but then when I closed it and tried to boot Fedora, it seemed to hang. I tried to boot using a super grub 2 CD I had made, but that failed. I tried all the options. I then tried again to boot and this time my old Fedora 13 system came up.
    As I understand, you only managed to get through the first part of the upgrade process - the one of downloading packages. You did not manage to reboot to actually start doing the real thing - installing the packages.

    Have you only tried rebooting once, failed and went directly to try the rescue CD? If so, I think what could have happened was that the preupgrade set some grub parameter telling that the next boot should be using preupgrade kernel and any later ones were just done in the usual way. What does your grub menu looks like? Does it have a preupgrade entry in it?

    By the way, I seem to remember that booting the preupgrade kernel took quite a while. When it starts you get a blinking cursor for quite a long time before it kicks in. The last time I did it it took maybe a minute or so. For how long did you wait until you decided that "it seemed to hang"?

    Of course, 13 to 16 is a big jump, so this could also be a problem. Or some part of preupgrade did not fit in /boot. You did not get any error messages?

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    Re: What in the world happened?

    I finally found out what happened.

    Again, I got a message saying an update was available, and I proceeded to let it do the installation using preupgrade. I had already prepared the ground by deleting earlier versions of the kernel from /boot and emptying /boot/upgrade so that I would at least have a chance for it to work.

    It then went through all the steps, taking almost no time because .../yum already contained the files to be downloaded. It then tried to boot, and this time I gave it at much time as it needed. When all was finished, it told me it had failed because I couldn't skip more than two releases, i.e., go from Fedora 13 to Fedora 16.

    I could of course do a full scale installation of Fedora 14 or 15----in the process enlarging boot so there wouldn't be any question of space limitation. But I presume I can get preupgrade to give me Fedora 14 or Fedora 15, and either of those should work. It decided to give me the ltest available release, Fedora 16, but there must be some way to override that choice.

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    Re: What in the world happened?

    If you type preupgrade (as root) it lets you choose the version.

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    Re: What in the world happened?

    it's pretty silly that it downloads all the fc16 rpms before realising it can't do the upgrade!

    I would just upgrade via yum, which will leave the old grub bootloader intact, you can install grub2 later if you need to use it.

    to save downloading all the rpms again you could try:

    Code:
    yum -y -C --releasever=16 distro-sync
    (boot to runlevel 3 first, then login as root)

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