I have tried several times to upgrqade my current Fedora 11 desktop setup to 14, but with continued lack of success. I will give this
http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-upg...top-and-server
a try tonight, to rule out the possiblity that one of these commands as precursors to preupgrade will get the process to work.

Previously I had tried to use preupgrade to go straight to 14, and after rebooting got a black screen. Hitting the space bar gave me a dialog box saying I couldn't upgrade straight to 14, then I was left with another black screen, which I couldn't get out of without turning off the computer.

I then tried to upgrade to 12 but hadn't cleaned up the img file, so wound up in the same place. I then (I thought) cleaned up, tried 12 again, and this time got a black screen that wouldn't respond whatever I did.

I've since bought both the 32 bit and 64 bit versions of the Fedora 14 boot (yes, I've backed up my hard drive) but my computer doesn't recognise either for booting (I have CDROM set in my BIOS as the primary boot source but the computer just goes through to booting from the hard disk)

I have a Gigabyte motherboard (GA-MA785-GMT-US2H),which I know was a problem for the 64 bit Fedora 13 install. My CPU is an AMD Athlon II x4 62 (which supposedly works 32 bit and 64 bit). My DVD Writer is an LG (Black) and I can't find a video card in my computer's part list, so I assume that's from the motherboard (I've also seen suggestions that an nVIDIA video card can be a factor). I've Googled several times but can't find an indication that anyone else is having this problem. The Fedora doco gives no indication that any of my hardware could cause a problem.

Thanks for reading.

You should reinstall with F14 completely.
F11 is too old. You need a 500MB boot partition to use preupgrade, F14 uses ext4 filesystem by default, and also splits / and /home into different lvm volumes.

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As I said in my post yesterday, I have also tried to do a fresh install of Fedora 14, both 32 bit and 64 bit, and that doesn't work either.

As it happened, I still had the 64 bit disk in the DVD drive when I tried to upgrade to 12, and on reboot the machine finally recognised it as a boot disk, but as soon as I had finished checking the disk (which was nominally fine) and proceeded, Anaconda failed (no useful information provided). Every other time I have tried either disk, my computer has just not tried to boot from the DVD at all. Has anyone seen this problem with F14, and if so, do they know what to do about it? I am close to abandoning Fedora and trying Ubuntu instead, which must be more user-friendly.

I still haven't successfully updated my operating system, but it turned out the problem with reading the boot disks was just that my DVD burner was defective. I can boot from the disks now. Booting from the Fedora 14 i686 disk froze partway through, although that's another problem, and I haven't tried the i386 one yet.

I finally had time to try upgrading to FC14 (I didn't and don't have an FC15 disk and didn't want to delay the process any further) and everything seemed to go OK until I logged in after rebooting. The desktop was blank, with no icons or menu. I could temporarily access Firefox by creating a dummy file and asking to open that, but after the first success, Firefox then opened invisibly. Several hours of downloading debugging material and rebooting achieved nothing. Fortunately I had also obtained an Ubuntu boot disk, which I'd previously managed to try out as a live CD without having to install, so it was goodbye Fedora (and goodbye struggling for days or even weeks trying to get what should have installed automatically to work, as I have evey time I've upgraded Fedora), hello Ubuntu.