Can't update F9

[Alan Evans]

Hello, helpful, friendly types.

I have an old laptop that, for whatever reason, I can't install F10 on
directly. I can't remember what the problem was, exactly, but the
installer pukes or freezes or somesuch. So the machine has languished
on a shelf for several months.

Anyway, I decided to give it another go this weekend. My strategy was
to install and update F9 then immediately upgrade to F10 over the
network. So I booted my old F9 boot disk and installed F9 by FTP.

Then I did a yum update and was surprised that only 5 packages would
be updated. Only then did I recall the oldkey/newkey madness. I went
ahead with the mini-update, that proceeded all the way to the end --
download, update, and cleanup, then failed with a long, cryptic
backtrace. That's odd, I thought, but it seemed to accomplish the
update, so I rebooted the machine and attempted the final update.

No joy. Now all yum does is spend all night failing with "Bad
checksum" on URL after URL trying to retrieve "updates-newkey" until I
either kill it or it eventually (after a very long time) bails out
with another backtrace. What I seem to have now is a perfectly running
F9 system that can't be updated nor new packages installed. I've tried
"yum clean all" which didn't help, and now I'm at the end of what I
know how to do with any confidence.

What can be done?