[Cooker] 9.0 to Cooker upgrade problems

[Jason]

Hi all,

I will try and keep this brief, I have been running cooker and updating it almost daily (unless it totally fuscked up my system) via either freshen or urpmi or whatever, since 8.x. No major problems except sometime after 9.0 my sound died (I have a SB16) and I couldn't get it to work no way no how (even using sndconfig etc.). Anyway, I recently bought a new harddrive and decided to do a fresh 9.0 install then update to the latest cooker. I won't go into what an abortion of an install 9.0 was and how hard I had to work to get it going because 9.0 installs have been pretty well covered here.

Now, my problem. I have tried upgrading to the latest cooker from 9.0 several ways, all of them failing miserably. Maybe you all can help. First I tried a basic freshen but too manu deps to fill. So I tried rpmdrake. I have ALL of the latest RPMS and RPMS2 rpms downloaded and configured as urpmi sources. So, I tried to upgrade a few packages at a time starting with drakxtools etc. No matter how few or many packages I choose, it starts to install and then abruptly fails and says "installation failed, some files are missing, you may want to update your sources database". Bah, I've done that!! I also tried individual rpm upgrades (via kpackage) with no success (except for the kernel and makedev which upgraded fine).

SOOO, I decided to do a mdkinstall. The process?? Download the current cooker mdkinstall directory, download the current cooker base directory and all current RPMS/2/Contribs, then make an install floppy from the cooker hd.img file via:
dd if=hd.img of=/dev/fd0
I thought, aha!! This will surely do it since it is like a normal install/upgrade based on cooker packages. No dice. I booted from the floppy, and I told it where the files were blah blah. Ok, fine so far, it got to the point of loading the program into memory which completed just fine. It then said "in second stage install", then "wait, probing serial ports", then it said "version file missing" (whatever that means, version of what??).

It seemed to be ok and started the graphical install anyway. I got through the initial phases ok, then it got to the harddrive detection stage. It error'd out at this point saying "an error occured, undefined subroutine& modules::interactive::load_category called". Hmph, alllrighty then. I had to hard reboot as it was stuck in an undending loop because it would come up with the same error over and over when I hit ok.

I would like to get back up to "cooker" speed but short of 2 things I can't see how. I can use makecd (which I have never done and I hear is pretty challenging) to mak a cooker iso or I can wait for an interim cooker iso release which may (hopefully) happen sometime soon.

I hope someone has some ideas for me ;) Thanks all.

BTW, my system is a pentium II 300 Mhz (Klamath) desktop with 512 MB SDRam and 3 harddrives, 2 seagate (one 3GB with Winblows 98se on it, one 40GB with Linux on it) and 1 western digital 15GB data drive formatted as FAT32. Basically, it's nothin' special or out of the ordinary.

Thanks for any help,

Regards,

Jason Greenwood