Very BAD preupgrade experience.

[Robert G. (Doc) Savage]

On Wed, 2009-12-30 at 23:43 +1000, Michael D. Setzer II wrote:
> Just had a bad experience with preupgrade.
> Had a phenom II x64 machine that had Fedora 11 freshly installed with 
> default settengs a few weeks before 12 came out. Finally decided to try the 
> upgrade to see how it would work, but could have done a clean install if it 
> didn't work.
> 
> Preupgraded started find downloading files, but eventually came up with a 
> message that it needed more space on /boot. Removed all but latest kernel, 
> and memtest and eventually needed to remove the splash graphic to get it to 
> work, but fianllly got enough space. So the preupgrade to finish the process 
> to reboot. Then when it rebooted, there was a message that it needed more 
> space, but there was nothing on the /boot to be removed. I was able to boot 
> back to the Fedora 11 kernel, and then tried a last resort option. Took the 
> initrd in the upgrade directory, and first gunziped it, and then used lzma on it. 
> The resuld was about 500M smaller size, and then was able to reboot. This 
> then alllowed the preupgrade boot to work, and the system has now 
> upgraded. 
> 
> It would have been nicer to get a message to either no do a preupgrade, or 
> to have a way to resize the systems. Would have tired partimage, but it 
> doesn't resize lvm, so that would be another problem. 

Michael,

It's too late now, but Michael Chronenworth posted a much simpler
solution to preupgrade's /boot space problem. He moved install.img
from /boot to a thumb drive. When anaconda doesn't find it in /boot, it
asks for its location. Point anaconda to the thumb drive and the upgrade
will proceed without a hitch.

If the partitioning default for fresh installs would increase /boot from
200MB to 300MB in future releases, this problem would gradually
disappear.

--Doc Savage
  Fairview Heights, IL