Fedora 12 in the house
I’ve got a fair amount of hardware around the house. The upgrade bug bit me over the holidays, and I decided it was high time to upgrade to Fedora 12 on some of that hardware, since it’s F12 has been out a couple of months, and it looks pretty stable.
First up on the upgrade list was my son’s laptop. He’s got a pretty run-of-the-mill laptop, AMD single core processor, ATI x1000 series graphics, wireless, etc. His notebook has been used heavily (he frequently leaves it on all night playing music), and Fedora 10 reached it’s End Of Life just a few days ago.
I used preupgrade (a great utility) to do the upgrade. Everything downloaded and prepped fine until I rebooted to start the install proper. It turns out that his boot partition was a little small. I thought I could fix that without reading the instructions, and that was a mistake. When I went out and deleted all of the kernels, initrd, System.maps etc from the /boot directory, the installation continued just fine. The post-installation failed to properly put the grub.conf file in order, and therefore his laptop wouldn’t boot. I turned my attention away from the laptop and went on with upgrading my Compaq DL360. I figured I cold just copy the appropriate files from the DL360 once I got it installed.
The Compaq DL360 has had it’s RAID controller removed and an eSATA card installed. This allows me to boot off of a 1TB WD MyBook. I proceeded to use preupgrade to upgrade this box. This installation went fine until the reboot, at which time I got a message “/dev/sda1 not cleanly unmounted“. It seems that others have had this problem, but didn’t post the answer. I fought with this problem for HOURS, until I randomly tried changing the filesystem type from EXT2 to EXT3. The installation proceeded without a hitch. I’m not sure what’s wrong with the fsck in the installation, but someone should have a look at it. BTW, I posted my answer on linuxquestions.org, so maybe someone else can save a little time. I need to go looking for other instances of this question and post my answer there too….
Once I got the DL360 installed, I simply copied the boot files over to the laptop, and I had two Fedora 12 installs up and running in a few minutes. I got brazen and upgraded my main laptop after that (Lenovo Z60t). The only problem with that install was that my system partition was a bit small, so I had to aggressively delete files until the installation was happy with the free space. Hint: you can delete *all* of the locale files (most of which aren’t used) if you’re not planning on booting the box again until the installation is over.
Thank God for rescue disks!