Re: Time to upgrade FC8->FC10

On Wednesday 11 February 2009, Paul W. Frields wrote:
On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 09:31:58AM -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
So, I'll ask it again: Preupgrade wants to download the install image to
the /boot partition. Unforch the F8 installer refuses to allow a /boot
partition of over 199 megs, and we all know that image has to be bigger
than that. So the question remains: How do I tell preupgrade to use /tmp,
or even / as a scratchpad location for this install image download?

I'm not aware of any such limit, and asked a few knowledgeable folks
who weren't either. What I suspect happened is you tried to create a
/boot partition in the existing space between the beginning of your
hard disk, and an existing partition (probably the extended area,
maybe swap) after it that you weren't blowing away.

The drive was at that point clean when it failed the first time, then I went
back before I started the install again, used fdisk to make a 500MB 1st
partition, a 2gb swap next so it was on the outside fast part of the drive,
and several more partition of various sizes cuz I like /var on its own, /root
on its own/ and /home on its own, but when I restarted the installer and it
put it clear at the end of the disk and kept it there regardless. WTH is it
with this that it also insists that /root cannot be a separate partition, but
must be a subdir of /? Total nonsense, that you cannot even setup a drive
the way you want it, skip that part of the install & just go do it.

I have never figured out why you people hate fdisk so much. Back when you
called it disk druid or some such it was a PIMA, and while the face is now a
lot prettier, it is just as terminally broken in its heart as ever.

There are a limit
to what even good heuristics will do to address this problem, and
having played with the installers for other distros, I don't think
it's unique to Fedora.

Probably not and will remain so until all are using fdisk or (g)parted to do
the disk configuration.

You can use parted -- or better yet, one of its GUI cousins -- to deal
with this problem, but it's not a simple exercise by any means. If
you're reading this in an interface that uses a fixed-width font, this
diagram might make sense. Otherwise, it might not:

Perfect here.

.-- beginning of disk end of disk --.
V V

|=====|==========|=================================================|

/boot swap extended partition (maybe LVM?)
200 MB 1 GB (rest of disk)
sda1 sda2 sda3

Some of that 200 MB is taken up by the kernels, initial ramdisks, etc.
your system has installed. You could remove extra kernels to make
more space; each set of files takes up somewhere in the neighborhood
of 8-10 MB, I believe. Then you could try preupgrade. If you tend to
keep lots of kernels that could be a problem. I thought that the
amount of data that preupgrade downloads is under 150 MB, but not
much.

If you reinstalled and chose to reuse that extended area and swap
as-is, you ended up with limited choices for resizing /boot.

This time it will be on a 400GB deathstar. Distro yet TBD, but likely ubuntu.

On the other hand, if you did a whole bunch of partition-moving voodoo
-- and I promise you it's not for the faint of heart, I've done it
myself, only after a full backup -- you *might* be able to end up with

this:
|-------|==========|===============================================|

empty swap extended partition
300 MB

Now you've got extra space and when you run the installer, you can
keep the existing partitions and write a bigger /boot as well.

And I just got finished half an hour ago, moving my complete amanda vtape
archive to a new 1TB drive, so yes, you could say I'm reasonably familiar
with such, as long as the supplied tools don't override what I want. In the
F8 case for both installs, they did, either resetting my choices to what they
wanted, or by refusing to recognize them at all.

If I was to reinstall on this drive, I'd just move the end of boot/swap border
in about a half a gig.

Really, in the interest of time and hair-pulling, in these cases I
simply tend to back up data and reinstall, setting up the partitions
in a more useful way for future-proofing. Right now, I'd go for about
250-300 MB for /boot to ensure that future preupgrades fly without a
hitch.

And all you have to do is get past the 199meg limit for /boot that the F8
installer insisted on. Use fdisk to set it up bigger, and the installer
would not recognize it.

--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Some scholars are like donkeys, they merely carry a lot of books.
-- Folk saying

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