experiences with preupgrade?

[Kam Leo]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 6:45 PM, Michael Hannon <jm_hannon at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Greetings.  At work we're attemtping to upgrade a bunch of Fedora 8
> (i386) systems to Fedora 10, using the preupgrade utility.
>
> We've tried this on five or six systems now.  In a couple of cases it
> has been laughably easy to upgrade this way.  But in the majority of
> cases the procedure fails completely.
>
> We had one case where the system halted (frozen) at the:
>
>    GRUB
>
> prompt.  This was during the first reboot after running the preupgrade
> utlity.
>
> In another case, the system hung at the same place (first reboot after
> running preupgrade) with some indecipherable graphic repeated endlessly
> across the screen:
>
>    mumble  mumble  ...  mumble
>    mumble          ...  mumble
>    .                    .
>    .                    .
>    .                    .
>    mumble          ...  mumble
>
> In another case that was reported to me, but which I didn't see
> first-hand, the entire preupgrade process seemed to go entirely
> smoothly, but the system was still running Fedora 8 after all the
> reboots.
>
> Am I missing something here?  As I said, when the procedure works, it
> seems very simple, so it's hard to see how we could be missing steps or
> whatever.
>
> Is this behavior typical?  Is there some workaround, e.g., some kernel
> parameter to supply, or some other edit to grub.conf, for instance?
>
> Thanks.
>
> -- Mike

Last night I tried preupgrade on a VMware Workstation F8_x64 client.
After downloading 2+ GB of packages the installer (anaconda) could not
find the drive it was supposed to upgrade.  That'll teach me to listen
to fanboyish chatter. Better off installing fresh using DVD or ISO
image.