Well I finally got my desktop and development server upgraded to FC12; and what a nightmare that was.
For anyone doing a fresh Fedora install DO NOT accept the default filesystem layout !.
Updating the FC11 desktop server that I had inplemented from a clean FC11 install, using the defaults, preupgrade was able to perform the upgrade after I deleted all but the current kernel files from /boot to make room.
However the FC10 server did not have enough space free in /boot to complete, of course it told me that after it had chewed up my download allowance by downloading all the required packages.
Didn’t want to download the packages yet again (or spend months trying to get all the customisations back onto the server), I was determinted to get the FC10 server upgraded to FC12 using preupgrade.
And of course the gparted CD couldn’t enlarge /boot as the rest of the disk was LVM and gparted doesn’t support resizing LVM (probably wise, its a bit complicated).
It wasn’t easy, but I got there. The steps were basically
*1*) Backing up /home (it was in a seperate LVM).
*2*) Booting off the install CD in recovery mode and messing about to shrink the physical disk partition used by the LVM filesystems with resize2fs, lvmresize, pvresize, parted to zap the disk partition down to enclose the new pv size etc I had a small enough LV/PV that I was comfortable CloneZilla could restore it down into a much smaller space.
*3*) The boot off the CloneZilla CD to backup the new zapped by parted /dev/sdaN using the CloneZilla savepart option.
*4*) Then booted the gparted CD, deleted all disk slices except for /dev/sda1 that contained /boot and dragged /boot up to over 2GB (lots of space, didn’t want to have to do all this again) and reseize2fs’ed it. Then created a new /dev/hdaN a lot larger than the one backed up by CloneZilla so I could expand it out when happy again.
*5*) And then booted from the CloneZilla CD to restore the backed up partition into the new /dev/sdaN (which eventually worked when I realised /dev/sdaN had to be a linux partition not a LVM partition); it eventually booted.
*6*) Then booting off the install CD in recovery mode again I messed about with lvcreate, pvresizing, lvresizing, resize2fs’ing that /dev/sdaN slice to recreate the swap LV (which had to be deleted to shrink the partition origionally as pvresize won’t shrink if any LV exists after the first one) to fully expand that PV and filesystem into the space I had allocated.
*7*) And then created a new /dev/sdaN+1 using all remaining space on the disk and created a PV/VG/LV for the home filesystem I had backed up seperately.
And then the preupgrade command worked just fine to upgrade from FC10 to FC12.
Did I stop there ?, no. Because the desktop FC11 to FC12 upgrade that worked ok in the first instance was so tight on space I went and reworked all that magic on my desktop to give that a 2Gb /boot as well; it should cope with preupgrade for FC13/FC14/FC15 at least now.
Thank god I hadn’t been using raid, that would have been even trickier. But I’m future proofed for a few years at least now.
And all that hard work (it took weeks) was required simply because the default filesystem layout for Fedora (up until FC11 anyway, don’t know about FC12 as I haven’t done a clean install of that, I managed to upgrade :-) in the end).
Basically the default /boot filesystem size it tooooo small.
So as stated at the start of the post, for anyone doing a fresh Fedora install DO NOT accept the defaule filesystem layout !. Allocate at least a couple of GB for /boot.
