I tried to upgrade OpenSUSE 10.1 to OpenSUSE 10.3. My PC is a Laptop PC with an 80 GB hard drive. I have quite a many data files on my PC and hard drive had only 3 per cent of free space at the beginning. I was unsure, if it was enough but thought that YaST will tell me if there is not enough free space for upgrade.

At the beginning YaST wanted to remove quite many packages. I had installed many packages from the source and selected to keep many of those ones YaST wanted to remove.

I also turned off the automatic dependency checking. When dependencies were ok and I had accepted the removed packages, YaST wanted to install additional packages due to dependencies. I accepted those all.

When upgrade started I went to sleep. After some hours I woke up and checked, if this upgrade had completed. It was not. There was still some 1174 packages to install and YaST reported that a subprocess had failed. YaST provided three options: Cancel, Try again, and Skip. When I clicked the Skip button, I got the same error message from the next package. When I clicked Cancel button, I got again the same error message from the next package.

My conclusion was that I had run out of space and it was better to cancel this upgrade. It looked that if I wanted to cancel upgrade now, I had to click Cancel button thousands time. I selected the fourth option: Power off and went back to bed.

When I tried to boot my Laptop (with OpenSUSE 10.1, no OpenSUSE 10.3 in the boot menu) next morning, I got the following error messages:

INIT: Id “3″; respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

INIT: Id “4″; respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

INIT: Id “5″; respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

INIT: Id “1″; respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

INIT: Id “2″; respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

INIT: Id “6″; respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

and the same error messages second time. I decided again to make a power off.

It looks like I have succeeded to corrupt my OpenSUSE installation. For bugzilla reporting Open Source development teams want different kind of information about hardware construction, installation log, etc. I can’t provide anything like that, so I have ignored bugzilla and decided to write this document. Let’s hope that someone will tell OpenSUSE YaST team about those problems I encountered when I tried to upgrade OpenSUSE.