F8 -> F9 Preupgrade Issues

[Dave Cross]

I've just spent a few hours trying to upgrade from F8 to F9 using
preupgrade. It still hasn't worked and I no longer have a working
Linux installation. I'm typing this on Windows. Here's my story.

I ran preupgrade yesterday and downloaded all of the required RPMs (or
so I thought). This evening I booted into the installation procedure.

The first problem was that the path for the stage 2 image was wrong. I
had to reboot into my old Fedora installation and edit the grub.conf
to add a slash to the front of the path. It was:

  stage2=hd:sda6:boot/upgrade/stage2.img

And I changed it to:

  stage2=hd:sda6:/boot/upgrade/stage2.img

I see from other messages here that this is quite a common issue.

I rebooted into the upgrade procedure again and it started running.
But then it told me that it needed to pull some more RPMs from the
net. But unfortunately, the minimal system that was running didn't
recognise my Centrino card so it had no network access. After a while
it timed out and told me that it was missing the kernel RPM.

I dug out an old Buffalo wireless card which is supported by the
standard kernel and tried again. We got past the previous problem, but
then it warned me that it couldn't find a boot loader in my old
installation. I told it to create a new one.

The upgrade procedure then went on. And on. At one point it told me
that it was doing some post-installation clean-up which might "take a
while". That "while" took about an hour.

Finally it finished. But it gave me one final error message, saying
(again) that it couldn't find a kernel and that therefore it wouldn't
write a new boot loader configuration. I rebooted, expecting to be
able to boot into my old kernel and try to work out what the problem
is.

But that's not what happened. It turns out that my grub.conf _had_
been updated. And now it contains only two entries - the Windows on
that I'm currently using and the preupgrade installation one. There's
not one to boot into Linux.

So here I am on Windows. I've installed Explore2fs so I can read (and
write to) my Linux partition. I can edit my grub.conf, but I'm not
sure what I need to add. I can find the vmlinuz file in /boot but
there's no initrd.img file.

Currently my favourite plan is to download a live image, boot that and
try to patch it up from there.

Unless anyone has any better suggestions.

Cheers,

Dave...