On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 09:31:58AM -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: > So, I'll ask it again: Preupgrade wants to download the install image to > the /boot partition. Unforch the F8 installer refuses to allow a /boot > partition of over 199 megs, and we all know that image has to be bigger than > that. So the question remains: How do I tell preupgrade to use /tmp, or > even / as a scratchpad location for this install image download? I'm not aware of any such limit, and asked a few knowledgeable folks who weren't either. What I suspect happened is you tried to create a /boot partition in the existing space between the beginning of your hard disk, and an existing partition (probably the extended area, maybe swap) after it that you weren't blowing away. There are a limit to what even good heuristics will do to address this problem, and having played with the installers for other distros, I don't think it's unique to Fedora. You can use parted -- or better yet, one of its GUI cousins -- to deal with this problem, but it's not a simple exercise by any means. If you're reading this in an interface that uses a fixed-width font, this diagram might make sense. Otherwise, it might not: .-- beginning of disk end of disk --. V V |=====|==========|=================================================| /boot swap extended partition (maybe LVM?) 200 MB 1 GB (rest of disk) sda1 sda2 sda3 Some of that 200 MB is taken up by the kernels, initial ramdisks, etc. your system has installed. You could remove extra kernels to make more space; each set of files takes up somewhere in the neighborhood of 8-10 MB, I believe. Then you could try preupgrade. If you tend to keep lots of kernels that could be a problem. I thought that the amount of data that preupgrade downloads is under 150 MB, but not much. If you reinstalled and chose to reuse that extended area and swap as-is, you ended up with limited choices for resizing /boot. On the other hand, if you did a whole bunch of partition-moving voodoo -- and I promise you it's not for the faint of heart, I've done it myself, only after a full backup -- you *might* be able to end up with this: |-------|==========|===============================================| empty swap extended partition 300 MB Now you've got extra space and when you run the installer, you can keep the existing partitions and write a bigger /boot as well. Really, in the interest of time and hair-pulling, in these cases I simply tend to back up data and reinstall, setting up the partitions in a more useful way for future-proofing. Right now, I'd go for about 250-300 MB for /boot to ensure that future preupgrades fly without a hitch. -- Paul W. Frields http://paul.frields.org/ gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717 http://redhat.com/ - - - - http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/ irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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