Red Hat 9 -> Fedora Core

Yesterday having successfully managed to install Fedora Core 3, I decided to take the plunge and upgrade my heavily patched Red Hat 9.0 installation. It ended up being a disaster.

Things got off to a bad start when the installer kept insisting that my /usr partition was too small. That is a lie, there was more than 1.1 GB free on it, but the installer wanted 430MB more. I cleaned out some unused files and moves some others to a different partition and managed to free up around 500 Mb. Then the installer wanted 19MB more!!.

What's really annoying is that you get this message after traversing quite a distance down the installation route. You then have to reboot your existing installation, free up space and then boot up again with the installation CD.

After quite a few attempts the installer managed to get over this disk space stumbling block but to my dismay I found that it will take around 150 minutes for the upgrade. The fresh installation took only about 40 minutes. After about 125 minutes the installer freaked out claiming one of the packages were corrupted. The end result was that my existing installation was messed up beyond repair and I didn't have anew installation to show for my efforts either.

Booted up again with the installer and this time took to the hard disk partitions with a butcher's knife. I cleaned out the /usr and/usr/local partitions and made them into a stripe set. Then started afresh installation, which did complete in about 40 minutes. That's not the end of the story. When I finally managed to boot up again, it was only to find that the old root and the /home partitions were totallycorrupted this definitely is time to take a break.