Upgrading from FC8 to F12 - please help

[Andrew Junev]

Hello All,

I tried to upgrade my old machine running Fedora Core 8 to the shiny
new Fedora 12 using 'preupgrade'. I know this isn't a recommended
method, but I thought I would still try - as it went just fine on a
test machine with a similar configuration.

I have 4 disks on my main machine: 2x200Gb are mirrored (RAID1) using
a cheap Promise controller card (they were still visible as separate
disks in FC8: /dev/sda and /dev/sdb), and other 2x1Tb drives are
connected directly to the motherboard (/dev/sdc and /dev/sdd).

Everywhere LVM is used (well, it was almost a default install of Fedora 8).
My system was on /dev/sda (or /dev/sdb, which is basically the same).
Two terabyte drives were used as data-disks only.


Within my old system, 'preupgrade' ran without visible errors. Then I
restarted the system, adding 'upgradeany' parameter in grub (otherwise
it won't find a target drive - same was on the test machine as well).

My boot options in grub look like this:

kernel /upgrade/vmlinuz preupgrade repo=hd::/var/cache/yum/preupgrade
stage2=hd:UUID=<probably a disk ID in LVM>:/upgrade/install.img
ks=hd:UUID=<same UUID as before>:/upgrade/ks.cfg upgradeany


It booted to the upgrade image and notified me that it can't
initialize /dev/sda and /dev/sdb, which are (according to the 
error message) 1Tb each! So it says that it couldn't initialize my
data drives - Ok, I thought that I could deal with that later.
So I ignored the message and then got next error:

"Unable to read package metadata...
<skip>
Cannon retrieve repository metadata (repmod.xml) for repository:
anaconda-InstallationRepo-200911081854.i386. Please verify its path
and try again."


I searched for the file and it's actually at:

/mnt/sysimage/var/cache/yum/

But that's probably not where installer expects it to be...

Here's output of df -k (copied it by hand, sorry for a bad
spacing):


Filesystem        Used     Available       Mounted on
/dev              204         508876       /dev
none              119076      390004       /tmp
/dev/loop0        118912           0       /mnt/runtime
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
                 3808856    23013188       /mnt/sysimage
/dev/mapper/pdc_eceihagjhp1
                  164366       20037       /mnt/sysimage/boot
/dev                 204      508876       /mnt/sysimage/dev
/dev/tmpfs             0      509080       /mnt/sysimage/dev/shm
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol02
                 4756984   145787384       /mnt/sysimage/storage


Looks like my filesystem is somehow mounted, although I'm not sure if
I should also have 'VolGroup00-LogVol01' somewhere as well...




As my installation couldn't continue, I decided to 'exit installer'
and reboot to my previous system. But my old system is now not
available as well. It starts to boot, shows something regarding LVM
(like it found a drive) and then shows a lot of lines:

/bin/sh invalid option --n

and stops with a login prompt. I can't login either - after I enter a
username it waits for some seconds and then brings a new login
prompt again...

Well, I know I did something wrong, and I don't know what it is. But I
would really like to bring my system back - either in Fedora 12 or
Fedora 8. Is there a way to do it, without reinstalling the whole
system from scratch (there are some valuable data, especially on the
1Tb drives)...?


I apologise for such a messy description. If there's anything I can
provide or clarify - let me know how I could do it.

I would really appreciate any hints on how to get my system back...


-- 
Best regards,
 Andrew