[nflug] Fedora 7 to 8 upgrade woes

[K O]

Folks:

I could use a nudge in the right direction.

I'm attempting to upgrade from Fedora 7 to 8 64-bit.  I got so excited 
because I burned the DVD on the day of its release.  Unfortunately, fate 
had to stick its pitchfork in my back side and say, "No, no no!" to my 
desire to be bleeding-edgingly on top of the newest offerings from Red Hat.

So, here's what happens: it gets to the point of checking for 
dependencies, seems about to complete, then hangs there.  This checking 
seems to take longer than what I would expect, and it seems to slow down 
as time goes by.  (Both of these can be, admittedly, a by-product of my 
imagination egged on by my impatience.)  The text-only installation 
indicates that the dependency check gets to 99%.  If I move the mouse, 
then the mouse pointer takes a few seconds to actually move, then there 
is some activity indicated at the hard drive and DVD drive.  But I don't 
seem to get any closer to a resolution.  The disc check comes out with a 
clean bill of health.  I've run rpm --rebuilddb (and even yum clean all 
for s&gs).  I can update my system with yum when normally booted, and it 
updates stuff.

An obvious answer is that my hard drive is going south.  If that's the 
only answer, then I will bite the bullet and get another one.  (I know 
that a fsck is probably in order, and I will do that while I wait 2 days 
for the dependency check to complete.)  But I'd rather do something 
else, not the least reason of which is the data transfer.  I'm thinking 
that it's some kind of RPM hell, in which case, how does one debug this? 
or are there any known, or suspected, RPMs outside of the Fedora repos 
that cause problems?  (I have atrpms and freshrpms set up as repos: 
perhaps more.  My gut feeling is that atrpms is the culprit.)

I know better than to install the updated fedora-release RPM.  I've done 
that before and borked my install, so, unless someone reassures me that 
this is pretty reliable, I shan't be doing that.  So, if anybody 
suggests that, then I offer my thanks, but I probably won't be doing that.

So any morsel of advise will be greatly appreciated.