On Wed, 2012-02-08 at 13:36 -0500, sean darcy wrote: > Almost all (all?) users of preupgrade are using grub1. > > As I understand it, most (all?) grub1 systems have the first partition > starting at 63. > > Any system with a first partition starting at 63 will be bricked if it > runs preupgrade to F16. This last part seems not to be true. Someone else pointed out that there is a way to force grub2 to install on a disk with only 63 free blocks at the beginning, as that was the case with my desktop that I upgraded F14->F15->F16. It initially booted into F16 just fine. The problem was that I could then not modify the grub configuration; whenever I tried, I got the "embedding area is too small" error. Even something as simple as increasing the grub timeout was not possible. I expect the way to "force" it to install in a 63 block embedding area will be kludgy in some way and sooner or later it will bite you in the ass, so I think eventually you will want to repartition the disk so that it has a 2048 block embedding area. My experience with doing that was variable. When I tried this on my wife's desktop, where the first partition was root, I was able to dump and restore and complete the upgrade, but I ended up with a system that I could not update. I got a lot of bizarre errors from "yum update" saying "you should report these errors". But I'm using at least one third-party repo (rpmfusion) so I expect my system is considered "tainted" for this. On my Dell laptop, where the first partition is a small partition that just has some Dell utilities for Windoze on it, it was easy to dump, repartition, and restore, and everything worked after that. Except for one more problem. I have always created /var as a separate partition, so if something goes bonkers logging (which I have seen more than once), it won't fill up the root partition. That's what /var is for, right? And yet, upgrading from F15 to F16 always fails if /var is a separate partition; you get an error about not being able to find the RPM database. In every case, I had to put the /var files back onto the root partition to get the upgrade to work. All in all, the upgrade to F16 was by far the most difficult Fedora upgrade I have ever done. --Greg -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
