[olug] Be wary of preupgrade from Fedora13 to Fedora15 - systemd troubles

[Jay Woods]

My upgrade from F14 to F15 also failed to work properly but in my 
case kmail wouldn't hook up with Cox. A complete reinstall and 
the wizard got close enough I could finish the output to Cox.

On Sunday, June 19, 2011 12:26:42 PM Rob Townley wrote:
> Since others are probably contemplating Fedora15...
> 
> First, i did not do preupgrade like i normally do.
>   Edit /boot/grub/grub.conf first to increase the timeout to 30 
seconds.
>   yum clean all
>   yum update yum preupgrade rpm something else
>   backup /home/
> 
> i have preupgraded about ten different machines since Fedora 
9 (maybe
> 8) numerous times and not once has it failed out of about 40x 
till
> now.
> Had done preupgrade from Fedora 10 to 11 to 13 successfully 
on this
> machine.  So i skipped 12 and decided to skip 14.  According to 
some
> systemd comments, skipping F14 was probably the fatal 
mistake, so i
> really wish preupgrade did not allow me to do so just like it has 
not
> allowed some version jumps in the past.  Probably need to file a 
bug
> report.
> 
> (Our home cox connection is slower than my 2.5G cell 
connection, but
> unusable till i get new phone and did not want it to take 
forever.
> Not very competitive of cox.net to raise rates to 
$25.99/month for
> 1Mbps down / 256kbs up, but that is an entirely other subject.)
> 
> The preupgrade from F13 to F15 seemed to be going along fine.  
The new
> 2GB /boot/ partition gave it plenty of space to store the 
upgrade
> image, so no warning about needing a ethernet cable.  It 
rebooted and
> installed over 2,000 packages successfully until preupgrade said
> MingW32-dev was corrupt and the preupgrade had to be 
cancelled.  It
> was a <90 day used very inexpensive seagate 1TB drive, so i 
figured
> bad harddrive.
> 
> The 3 hour BIOS level test of my new harddrive tested out ok, 
but it
> does not provide any SMART data or other real information.  
But at
> least according to this one test, there is nothing wrong 
physically
> with the drive itself.
> 
> After holding down the up-arrow key during boot i was able to 
get the
> grub menu to come up, but that took a long time to get the 
keypresses
> just right.   After running 'mount -a'  /boot/ was mounted rw so i
> could change /boot/grub.conf.
> 
> So i attempted to boot into the older F13, but it comes up with 
the same:
>   "Welcome to emergency mode.  Use "systemctl default" or 
^d
>   "systemctl default" results in
>   "Failed to issue method call:  Transaction is destructive."
> 
> There are some websites about creating a default softlink for 
the new
> systemd upstart replacement, but that appears ok already, 
but i need
> to double check.  (Not sure why they felt the need to have yet 
another
> sysV init replacement as F14 boots up pretty fast as it is.)
> 
> Once i properly backup /var/log/yum.log,  /home/ and /etc/ and
> /usr/local/etc/, everyone says to do a default install from the 
CD.
> Thereafter, /home/ should by default have its own VolumeGroup 
and it
> is safe to do repeat for the next version.  But it appears to me, 
that
> leaves out my old /etc/ and /usr/local/  configured files.  
Anything
> else i am not remembering to backup?
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