Hi 
I tried to upgrade f37 → f39 using this manual
and eventually I got:
“Oh no, something has gone wrong. A problem has occurred and the system can’t recover. Please contact a system administrator.”
cat /etc/fedora-release
Fedora release 39 (Thirty Nine)
ls -l /usr/bin/dnf
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 5 Oct 19 16:04 /usr/bin/dnf -> dnf-3*
journalctl errors and failures
Can anybody help me to fix it?
Hello @chakka ,
Did you first make sure your F37 was fully up to date? You can do this with sudo dnf distro-sync. After it completes you should be able to do the upgrade.
I was following this Upgrading Fedora Using DNF System Plugin :: Fedora Docs
and achieved the last command
sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot
which rebooted and started upgrade.
upgrade finished successfully, I got problem after reboot
So the upgrade completed and you can log into the tty but not the gui is that the problem?
yes. in normal reboot I’m getting in that famous “oh no…” error screen
So I’ll ask again, can you log into the terminal after upgrade?
yes, I can get to tty and login there.
Do you have nvidia graphics?
[Edit] If so please read this post Third-party modules (e.g. Nvidia) are not rebuilt during system upgrade
no, I don’t have nvidia. I have Thinkpad t480 with intel UHD 620
I have a ThinkPad E530 Edge that I had an issue upgrading some time back. What was happening there was the whole upgrade would finish then fail to actually write the EFI entry due to the flash area being full. I had to delete files in my efivars that had $DUMP in their filename to free up space in my BIOS flash area. I assumed they were related to Lenovo diagnostics and of no consequence. Anyway after doing that and repeating the upgrade process I was able to boot into an upgraded system. I am not saying you’re facing the same issue but it may be worth checking your efivars to see. You can find out by using ls ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/.
[Edit] I took a number of days searching both in Fedora community and elsewhere, and I found the answer on stack exchange and it was specifically for Unbuntu, but using a Lenovo ThinkPad.
Hello @chakka ,
If you don’t mind, could you post the terminal text itself between with the “</>” button? It makes it very much easier to read.
[Edit] Also, can you let me know how comfortable you are with doing command line activities with your PC? And please understand that I am not recommending you have the same issue I had, but this is an avenue of investigation you can pursue. I had to find out about how Lenovo handled my laptops flash (it’s over two chips in my case), and I had to first verify that my flash area was running out of space. Perhaps @mpearson has some thoughts.
yeah, I also prefer formatted text, but I still can’t send all this output to my mobile 
Also, can you let me know how comfortable you are with doing command line activities with your PC?
I’m super-comfortable with CLI usually
thank you so much for your help 
added some new journalctl error and failures logs to first message
I also found out that dnf is not working:
$ dnf
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/bin/dnf”, line 61, in <module>
from dnf.cli import main
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named ‘dnf’
Fedora 39 updates to python 3.12. dnf is written in python, and that error shows that the python on your path is not the python that dnf needs. Check that you don’t have an old python on your path and that you don’t have any active python virtual environments. Also, it might help to run dnf as root. On my Fedora 39 laptop, rpm -q shows that I have python3-3.12.1-2.fc39.x86_64 and dnf-4.18.2-1.fc39.noarch . If you still have the fc37 versions of either one, something might have gone wrong when you did the update. I did the same update as you from 37 to 39 (skipping 38) without any problems.
sudo dnf
gives me absolutely the same error
$ rpm -q python3
python3-3.12.1-2.fc39.x86_64
$ which python
/home/xuser/.pyenv/shims/python
$ python —version
Python 3.12.1
@william8000 by the link which you provided were suggested many ways to solve the problem. which one should I prefer?
If you have critical F37 packages they certainly may interfere with functionality.
Please try sudo dnf distro-sync --refresh and see if it does anything about bringing the appropriate packages up to date with the current fedora release.
I have a system that has been repeatedly upgraded from about F32 and this is the total list of packages that are not at the fc39 versions.
$ dnf list installed | grep -E 'fc32|fc33|fc34|fc35|fc36|fc37|fc38'
NetworkManager-ssh.x86_64 1.2.12-5.fc38 @fedora
NetworkManager-ssh-gnome.x86_64 1.2.12-5.fc38 @fedora
b43-openfwwf.noarch 5.2-30.fc38 @fedora
bitstream-vera-sans-fonts.noarch 1.10-48.fc38 @fedora
fwupd-efi.x86_64 1.4-1.fc38 @fedora
gfbgraph.x86_64 0.2.5-3.fc38 @fedora
iscan-firmware.noarch 20190508-9.fc38 @fedora
libgpuarray.x86_64 0.7.6-19.fc38 @fedora
netcdf.x86_64 4.9.0-5.fc38 @fedora
nim-srpm-macros.noarch 3-8.fc38 @fedora
dnf is broken 
I’m trying to fix it via reinstall python with rpm, but there are also problems there…
Sorry, I missed that.
It is possible to fix by downloading the appropriate rpms but I do not know the details. Someone may be able to guide you as to which packages to reinstall.