SUCCESS (see below)
Richard Emberson wrote:
I have an older machine that can not boot from cdrom. Also, I had some user data in one of the accounts.
So I mounted disc1, copied vmlinuz and initrd.img to /boot, unmounted disc1, added entry to /etc/grub.conf, then rebooted:
mount /dev/cdrom cp -a /mnt/cdrom/isolinux/vmlinuz /boot/FC2-install cp -a /mnt/cdrom/isolinux/initrd.img /boot/FC2-install.img umount /mnt/cdrom and add entry like: title Fedora Core 2 Installation root (hd0,0) kernel /FC2-install initrd /FC2-install.img to /etc/grub.conf (use /boot/FC2... when not relative to /boot)
Everything was going along fine; I did an upgrade (not install) and after 1 1/2 hours it said that the installation was a success and that
I should click the reboot button ... which I did.
Well, reboot started out ok, there was a single boot option on the grub boot page, but then it asked me to insert disc1. I did so and it then asked me if I wanted to upgrade or install.
hmmm.....
I selected upgrade and it proceeded to "upgrade" a php rpm from disc1 and compat-db rpm from disc3 and announced that the installation was successful and that I should click on the reboot button.
Ok, reboot started and then once again it requested that I insert disc1 and once again it installed the same two rpm's, php from disc1 and compat-db from disc3 and announced that the installation was a success.
I tried one more time with the same result.
So how do I break out of this? I really dont care about either php or compat-db, I'd like to somehow bypass installing them and get on with the boot. Are there parameters one can give at the grub command line to force a kernel load?
Help! Thanks.
Richard
Thanks to the many replies.
What I ended up doing ....
My original system had two scsi disks: disk1 with /boot and / and the other, disk2, with /home and /usr/local and I did not want to lose /home and /usr/local - which is why I wanted to upgrade, not install.
So I bought a new scsi (I do plan to build a new machine at home some time this Summer, so its not as extreme as one might think) using it to replace disk2 and did a redhat 9.0 on my old machine. I then mounted FC2 disc1 and copied vmlinux and initrd as described above. I then via grub booted using the FC2 code and did a full install. It worked. Now I can just replace the new disk2 with the old and the upgrade is complete.
IMPORTANT: the first time I did this - yes I did this twice - I for some unknown reason had disk1 contain /boot and /usr while the new disk2 had / - the redhat 9 install succeeded this succeeded but not the subsequent FC2 install!! - so the second time I had disk1 contain /boot and / while the new disk2 had /home and /usr/local and for this combination FC2 install (after installing redhat 9 a second time) worked.
Thanks again.
Richard
