Insufficient disk space when upgrading from Fedora 11 to Fedora 12

Fedora 12 got released at almost exactly the same time that I was switching Internet Service Providers. My gripe with my old provider was that their point-to-point wireless connection had become unreliable (up time varied between 85% and 90%). Doing an Internet upgrade from Fedora 11 to Fedora 12 seemed like a good way to test the new DSL connection and get my workstation upgraded to the latest release.

The download worked fine but installing the upgrade ran afoul of a known problem with the Fedora preupgrade process. I had made /boot its own partition and as is traditional with /boot a fairly small (200MB) partition at that. When I rebooted to the upgrade kernel, the upgrade appeared to start normally but after some processing declared it could not continue due to "insufficient disk space." Clicking on the "Details" button on the installer's dialogue box informed me that another 20MB were needed in /mnt/sysimage/boot. A quick look at the files in /boot revealed that it was very unlikely that any amount of removing old kernels would free up 20MB. I needed a different workaround.

The workaround I cam up with doesn't seem to be documented anywhere. I simply made a separate update directory on a file system besides /boot and then moved install.img and ks.cfg. install.img is about 117MB so this freed up more than enough space in /boot. I then edited my grub.conf file to point the Fedora installer at the new location for these files.

Unfortunately, the Fedora upgrade process cleaned out the grub.conf file that had my edits and I don't have an easy way of getting back to that point. The process I used for making the edits was to get the UUID of the file system that now held the upgrade directory that included install.img and ks.cfg and substitute this UUID for the UUID of my /boot partition on the Fedora 12 upgrade entry in grub.conf. Leave vmlinuz and the initrd files in /boot/upgrade since the grub boot process looks for these files relative to /boot (or I guess you could do further violence to your grub.conf file and point it at your new location for the upgrade directory but that seems like a bit much).

About the only fallout I've noticed is that the upgrade process removed the original upgrade directory from under /boot but, unsurprisingly, didn't remove the upgrade directory I created for install.img and ks.cfg.

The funny thing is that this approach is dependent on a Fedora upgrade bug that is documented. Apparently, the version of "preupgrade" that I installed didn't check for sufficient space in /boot and so blindly prepared the system for the upgrade only to have the upgrade fail as described above. This allowed me to apply this workaround and get Fedora 12 installed. I hope that the patched versions of "preupgrade" that are now available give the user the option of pulling down the upgrade files and then implementing this workaround.

Cheers,
Dave