[GRLUG] Can't upgrade to Fedora 17

[Eric Beversluis]

AAaaaaargh! After a 3hr download and several hrs spent trying to get it 
to work, I gave up on preupgrade. Although it was supposed to upgrade 
automatically once the download was complete and I rebooted, nothing 
happened. Instructions for what to do in this case (needing to tell the 
boot loader where the upgrade kernel was) were obviously meant for older 
hardware and after a long time and some interactions on the Fedora IRC, 
I tried to do a manual boot to the upgrade kernel, only to be told that 
it could be found--several iterations of this.

So I gave up on that and downloaded the whole F17 DVD, checked the 
CHECKSUM and burned the iso DVD. But that wouldn't work either. I'd  hit 
"enter" to leave the normal boot, select F12 to "Choose temporary 
startup device, and then selected "USBCD: SONY DVD RW DRU-840A", which 
is where the upgrade DVD was located. Nothing. After spinning for a 
while I got brought right back to the "Choose temporary startup device" 
again.  After spending lots of time trying and retrying, reading Fedora 
documents, etc. I gave up.

I loaded my gparted-live disk (it booted fine from the same SONY 
external DVD drive) and deleted everything--time for a clean install I 
thought. Maybe something to do with UEFI craziness (that caused me all 
kinds of trouble last year when I installed F15). But still no luck 
getting the computer to boot from the F17 DVD.

I don't think the DVD is defective. I was able to open it when it 
mounted on the computer (before I bricked everything). I suppose I could 
try to download the F17 iso again and burn a new DVD--the download got 
nuked with everything else when I wiped the drive.

BTW: when I now try to boot and select "Choose temporary startup 
device", the Boot Menu shows the deleted Fedora and "ubuntu"--left over 
from last september when I had to give up on Ubuntu because it wouldn't 
get the screen resolution right? Why is it still showing these old boot 
options when all that stuff has been deleted?

Trying to do this on Lenovo X120e with AMD E-350 CPU.

Any ideas?

PS--the Evolution people recently gave me grief for running an old 
version of Fedora and thus of Evo. This is why I hadn't upgraded--I knew 
there'd be crazy snafus and  I'd end up having to spend several days 
trying to get the upgrade to work.

Thanks.