Preupgrade reboot just sits & blinks

[DuaneF]

When preupgrade reboots, what's supposed to happen, and in what amount of time? I've tried it twice, trying to upgrade my desktop from F14 to F15 (Gnome). Both times, the download took about 40 minutes, but the reboot just sat there, with the cursor blinking in the upper left corner - no GRUB, nothing. When I then restart with Ctrl+Alt+Del, I can use the BIOS boot menu to pick the disk with F14, and it starts normally with no clue that anything has changed. Is something wrong here that I can fix?

[glennzo]

It's supposed to boot back into Fedora and continue with the upgrade process. I've tried this once or twice with mixed results. On one occasion it appeared that pre-upgrade couldn't find the correct partition to boot from so it just sat there doing nothing. I manually edited the parameters, rebooted and it worked. Preupgrade seems not worth the effort in my opinion. Save your important data and do a clean install.

[cantanima]

Originally Posted by DuaneF

When preupgrade reboots, what's supposed to happen, and in what amount of time? I've tried it twice, trying to upgrade my desktop from F14 to F15 (Gnome). Both times, the download took about 40 minutes, but the reboot just sat there, with the cursor blinking in the upper left corner - no GRUB, nothing. When I then restart with Ctrl+Alt+Del, I can use the BIOS boot menu to pick the disk with F14, and it starts normally with no clue that anything has changed. Is something wrong here that I can fix?

This happened to me yesterday, when I preupgraded from F15 to F16. I think it happened to me once before; I'm not sure. It startled me so much yesterday that, after waiting 10-20 seconds, I hit CTRL+ALT+DEL, and after some shutdown information flew by too quick to read, it restarted and went into the BIOS boot menu, then into GRUB, just like you.

I tried it again later, and again it seemed to hang. I waited a while, and voilà! After about a minute (possibly less, but it felt like hours) it came up! A flurry of information flew by, stuff that looked like hardware probing and whatnot, and voilà: anaconda started, then the graphical installer.

Apparently Fedora performs some quiet, internal reflection before doing anything, maybe a deliberate hang or something, I don't know. Whatever the case, it doesn't tell you what it's doing, and that can be upsetting. They ought to put up a brief text message asking you to wait.

Windows has done the same thing to me on occasion; that's the reason it occurred to me to try waiting. It's bad enough that Fedora does it, but hey, at least Fedora's free. You pay hundreds of dollars to Microsoft for the privilege of running their OS, and they put up a mysterious black screen upon rebooting after an upgrade? No wonder they just posted their first loss.