Unfortunately, I ran into quite a few snags trying to upgrade my 32-bit SuSE Linux 9.1 Professional installation to the 64-bit OpenSuSE 10.0 release. And, the DVD I created from the CD images was lacking quite a few packages. I ended having to back up my root partition and do a completely fresh install that included formatting the boot and root partitions. That's probably a good thing anyway, as it means my system is pretty much cleaned up of junk. I spent about twelve hours migrating my old system configurations to the new installations. Probably about twice as long as if the upgrade process had worked successfully.

In case you're wondering what sorts of problems I ran into during the upgrade process, here are some of the things I ran into. Many packages were listed as no longer maintained as part of OpenSuSE, and as a result, a few dozen of my packages were slated for deletion by YaST2. Although I didn't know it at the time, this is likely to have been the result of missing packages on my DVD. A dependency check complained a whole bunch about requiring an x86_64 version of the glibc files. I couldn't get this to go away. I tried to do a clean install without formatting my partitions as well, but the installer failed when trying to write the /etc/fstab file, even if that file was already removed. And after completing package installation, the boot setup always failed while trying to make the initrd image. Basically, it just didn't work.

Unfortunately, I'm still getting a GRUB error if I try to boot off my hard disk. But at least the error message is more informative and says there's a geometry incompatibility or something, instead of just saying error. I've switched to LILO to see if that might work better, but haven't tested it yet.

I've been up for almost twenty-four hours now, so I'm going to go to sleep soon.

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