On Sat, 27 Jun 2009 16:46:42 +0000, Beartooth TpBkR wrote:
My #1 machine has F10 on one hard drive, and XPPro/SP2 on the other.
[....]
So I'm looking at two opposite projects.
[....]
So far, I've had better success with preupgrade than with an
F11
DVD -- but always on single-boot machines. And the partitioner in
anaconda seems to be particularly fragile at present.
Which upgrade is to be preferred in each case -- preupgrade, or
DVD??
In the event, I found no clear criterion, and finally just
slammed the Gordian sword through the knot.
With one PC and one laptop that were talking to the GPSs -- or
that had before and that I thought still did -- and having had better
success with preupgrade than media, I used the former again.
It turned our a near thing -- a very near thing.
I did a PackageKit update, immediately followed by yum update
just in case, and then immediately gave the command to preupgrade. When
it had done most of its testing and downloading, and seemed close to the
home stretch, I went to my dinner and kept my hands strictly off till
morning.
It had gotten within a whisker: it was complaining that I needed
3 MB more space in /mnt/sysimage -- which was nonsense, even if it was
talking only of the (F10) linux drive. I have well over fifty gigs left
unused now.
I got it two or three times to the grub screen that it had
updated -- it had simply added the F11 option on top. XP was still on
the bottom.
It booted XP all right, and I updated the virus defense there.
All else looked normal.
I soon found that the F11 option led every time to a dead end;
but the F10 (the top one, at least; there were three or four older
kernels still there, PAE and plain) booted fine and seemed unchanged.
I had (and still have) no faintest inkling how to enlarge /mnt,
which did not contain anything, sysimage nor other. Finally I tried
several commands till I found one (rpm -q, iirc) that gave me a list of
kernels. Then I did yum remove on the oldest, followed by another reboot.
This time the F11 choice went to completion. Everything seems to
be running fine (I'm on it now) -- except that it now sees and identifies
one GPS, but can't actually transfer anything to or from it, even after
having my userid added to the dialout group.
And, of course, the Fates or whatever computer gods there be
(Klono, perhaps?) have to have their jest: the laptop can't talk to a GPS
any more, either.
But at the last need, I can still boot to XP. <sigh>
--
Beartooth Staffwright, Neo-Redneck Not Quite Clueless Power User
I have precious (very precious!) little idea where up is.