FESCO ticket#270 - preupgrade and F-12

[Jerry Vonau]

> On Fri, 2009-11-13 at 09:35 -0500, Andy Gospodarek wrote: 
> > On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 11:27:28PM -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > > Toshio Kuratomi (a badger gmail com) said: 
> > > > > There are definitely workarounds available, but none that meet the
> > > > > criteria for preupgrade as an effortless upgrade option.
> > > > 
> > > > So I'm a bit confused by what is so hard here.  preupgrade starts up,
> > > > finds it can't store stage2, and then tells you that you'll need to have a
> > > > wired connection to the internet if you want to use it.  So you have to
> > > > download stage2 when you reboot and you have to cart your laptop over to the
> > > > router to plug it in while it does so... it's not like I'm going to be using
> > > > it for work while anaconda is running....
> > > 
> > > Basically, the case where it fails is when there's enough space to download
> > > stage2, but not enough space left after downloading stage2 to do the
> > > upgrade.
> > > 
> >
> > Could we add some support to use a USB key as scratch space for any part
> > of this process?
>
> Not a bad idea.  Not sure who would add this support and test it before
> Tuesday.  Definitely something to consider as a future enhancement to
> preupgrade. 

You could hand edit the stage2= line and point is to any non-lvm partition including
a temporary usbkey. You would need to have a filesystem label on the usbkey, and 
change "Fedora" to be the name of your usbkey in the grub.conf file entry for 
preupgrade. Just make sure that the install.img resides in /images on the usbkey.
  
You could boot off the boot.iso and pass the needed options to anaconda, 
appending to the boot line does work with: 

append initrd=initrd.img stage2=hd:LABEL="Fedora" preupgrade \
repo=hd::/var/cache/yum/preupgrade ks=hd:sda1:/upgrade/ks.cfg

Yea, I know ks=hd:sda1 is less that ideal, but if that is the /boot 
partition unless your playing bios games with the boot order, where else 
can it be but sda1? This could be added to the boot.iso in a stanza as an 
option much like rescue.

Just some thoughts,

Jerry