Comments on Upgrade Your Desktop From Fedora 8 To Fedora 9 With PreUpgrade

I ran the "preupgrage" wizard last night and have run into a serious problem upgrading to Fedora 9. I'm a Dual Boot user with Windows XP 64 on drive HD0 and fedora on drive HD1.

 It looked like the process ran correctly but on the reboot I was left at a GRUB prompt. It took me some time to work out how to configure and get the GRUB bootloader corrected.

On starting I'm also discovering some issues with YUM not working correctly, it tells me what packages need updating, but it refuses to start the download process.

download took some hours and after a reboot...

i am unable to run anaconda upgrade :-(

i get some errors and the console debug messages goes something like "failed to mount loopback device /dev/loop0..."

and i get a message (in anaconda) "can read or find stage2 image on device /dev/sda1...please type in a new device..."

 i am currently upgrading with the FC9 DVD... hope it will run smoother :-)

thank you very good

I have a dual boot too and this pre-upgrade was a GRUB foul-up.  You should NOT select "Update the boot loader configuration" at all.  Choose "Create new boot loader configuration" and all should work well.  It did for me after a few false starts. 

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My dual boot is Fedora/WinXP.  After first trying this Preupgrade, I thought all was lost in my Windows install -- it was not.  I did not need to do any Windows rescue.  My solution was to re-install Fedora 8 -- which easily recognized Windows -- and then repeat the Preupgrade. 

Last nite I attempted to upgrade from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9 and it seemed a good way to try something different.

Following the howto is straight forward and soon my system was being upgraded.  Unfortunately there came along a power outage and when power resumed, my system started up and was booting Fedora 8.  Many errors as the system was being installed when this all happend.  Now I am upgrading via an install disc I had created awhile back.

I for one will not do the preupgrade thing again.  I will just get the source or the image and upgrade my system that way and know that it will be upgraded correctly and not tempt fate.

I tried the howto this morning and it failed. I guess the howto may work for a vanilla  desktop pc with ide drives, but I can attest to the fact that it fails completely for scsi drives. I have several rackservers spanning IBM x345 and Sun V20Z servers and the upgrade failed on both.

The Howto needs to address the inability to find the bootimage on scsi drives.

At least it was easy to terminate the failed Upgrade using Grub and that is a bonus. 

fwiw, I used this howto and the one on f9 to f10 with preupgrade-cli to do a headless upgrade from f8 to f10.  I can strongly recommend trialling on a virtual machine before doing the upgrade.

I found that there's an issue somewhere in the upgrade chain with the nspr rpm, which can leave you with an upgraded machine on which very little works. A workaround is to extract the missing 4 libs from the f10 base repo's rpm (nspr-4.7.2-2.fc10.i386.rpm) using rpm2cpio and drop them into /lib after running preupgrade-cli, but before rebooting. Then update f10 once installed. I also had to re-enable sshd before the reboot, as the upgrade disabled it, leaving an upgraded headless box that cannot be logged into.

 hth

Tim