laptop battery died while upgrading using Pre-upgrade

[Robert L Cochran]

On 06/16/2009 07:16 PM, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> Globe Trotter writes:
>
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Does anyone know how to address this problem? My laptop battery died 
>> while upgrading using Pre-upgrade. It was not connected. So what 
>> should I do when I switch it on?
>
> Cross your fingers, and hope that your RPM database isn't fscked.
>
>> Any suggestions?
>
> Nope, you'll be flying by the seat of your pants. It's anyone's guess 
> what state your system will be in. Chances are fairly good that you'll 
> be able to boot, at least in run level 1, so you can get a shell prompt.
>
> Presuming that you can get a shell, the next step would be to assess 
> the damage to your RPM database. Presuming that rpm --rebuilddb 
> survives, the next step would be to run "rpm -q -a", and see what 
> you've got.
>
> When rpm goes down in a middle of updates, the most likely result is 
> that the rpm database will list both the old and the new version of 
> each package, and you'll need to compile a list of them all, and 
> manually remove the old version of each package.
>
> Been there, done that. It's not fun, but the only other option is to 
> salvage the data, reformat, and reinstall.
>
> Once you manage to put your rpm database in a sane state, the next 
> best thing to do is to forget preupgrade, and run F11's installer, 
> which will clean up and finish the install.
>

I wonder if preupgrade keeps a log file of what it did up to the point 
your battery died? I also wonder if it built a kickstart file and saved 
to it incrementally? How about terminal output, was that saved anywhere? 
I've never done a preupgrade, my preference is to do fresh installs and 
then copy over the important data bits from my network. But I presume it 
logs its progress somewhere? Or not? What I'm hoping for is that there 
is a file somewhere that can be fed back to preupgrade which says: "I 
was at this point a when the system died. I can resume processing from 
here."

Bob