Question about Upgrading from existing Linux install option in Fedora
Greetings, I'm a relative newbie in the Linux world. Over the last 7 months I've been trying to learn and use the OS as much as possible, moving towards the goal of having no Windows boxes. Recently I hit a strange hiccup that I would like some opinions about.
I had been running Fedora Core Beta 2 on an HP laptop (700 Mhz, 256 MB RAM) and had the system running very well. I did not go to Beta 3, thinking rather that I would wait for the actual release. When the release came I installed over the Beta 2 using the "Upgrade from existing Fedora installation." The install went fine and when I booted up I had the new Fedora Core 1 kernel, updates packages, etc. Then I started having strange issues. For one none of my USB devices would work. I have several Flash card readers and none of them would mount, they just kept saying Not a Valid Block Device. I checked to make sure that USB storage was enabled in the Kernel, and the SCSI was enabled so I could access the sd- chain in /dev. All was right there as far as I could tell. I figured I'd move on and look deeper at Fedora Core 1. Unfortunatly the next roadblock I hit was that none of my pcmcia or cardbus devices would initialize. When I put one in a dmesg it would read as finding the card, but lsmod would report nothing. I double-checked that the pcmcia package was installed, but still nothing. OK, well, that's something I'll have to fix later, I thought, and moved on. Then I couldn't get a floppy to mount. At this point I was tired, and not thinking rationally so I formatted my drive and installed Fedore Core 1 on a clean drive. Now everything works like a champ.
Obviously, since I've formatted all of the evidence there's not much troubleshooting that can be done, but does anyone have any idea about what caused this? I've worked with MS operating systems since DOS 4.0 and there's an unspoken rule that you don't upgrade a Microsoft OS because bad things will happen. Does Linux have that same unspoken rule? I don't mind formatting each time I want to upgrade Linux, but knowing that I need to will be a tremendous relief to my mental health. :-)
Thanks for indulging a long post.
krestofre
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