F11 and Back to Square 1.

After going into all that trouble with Fedora 11. I landed back on square one thanks to Palimpsest. Since the time I upgraded to F11, It kept warning me about a hard drive that is on the verge of failure. Now I am someone who has suffered a lot from drive failures the most recent one was in October. None of those drives so much as mummered before failing so I thought I would take the warning seriously, specially because this drive is now 4 years old. Once upon a long ago, it was the largest drive that I had weighing in at 120GB. Now it's the smallest. The new drive is 500GB and cost about as much as the old one did. When you consider the fact that inflation is always 20% or higher in our country, a gigabyte now costs about 1/10th of what it used to do. As fate would have it the faulty drive was the very drive that had the '/' partition. All the files in it were rsynced onto the new drive after booting with the DVD in rescue mode. The /etc/fstab file was edited, taking care to use the UUID instead of the drive name. That's necessary because plugging / un-plugging drives causes their drive letters to change. I kept the old drive in but booted off the new drive and used it for a couple of days before unplugging it. That's when I started getting a blank screen on bootup. It was time to reboot with the DVD and to try to update grub. Yet grub installed refused to do it's task:

Could not find device for

Now that message appears to be truncated. There should be a device name at the end but it's simply not there. I had very foolishly formatted the drive as ext4 I am beginning to think that Fedora 11 isn't quite ready for it yet. Even so the /boot partition is ext2 (the Fedora installer refused to format it as ext4) Then I found a post which explains how to manually installed grub. Even after following those steps, all i got was just another blank screen on boot up. I tried once more and installed the boot loader into all three of the drives I have. Then toggling through the boot sequence, I finally managed to get a grub menu on bootup instead of blank screen. I suppose you can call that progress. By manually entering the kernel and initrd parameters, I could now get the machine to progress into the next step, only to see it freeze up just before the services are started. Fedora 11 official release is just a few days away. The easiest thing at this stage would probably be to just wait for it, But I decided to take the plunge and reinstall with the preview DVD.  Even then the installer bailed out several times apparently it's a time zone problem (more on that later). Once I sorted that out the installer proceeded very quickly probably because it recognized the RPMs that were already installed. I have a working machine once again, even though it still refuses to run VLC or tweetdeck and crashes when you try to use Mplayer.