My father used the in place upgrade via Discover the other day and it failed to boot on the other side, showing only a blank screen after POST. A few more attempted boots saw unreliable POSTing and when loading into the BIOS it would lock up frequently.
Installing Mint caused the system to boot again but did not fix the BIOS issue, an attempt to install Fedora 42 from a USB also proved unreliable and we’ve resorted to flashing the BIOS, is this something I should be concerned out regarding my own upgrade planned upgrade?
His specs:
Gigabyte X570 AORUS PRO
AMD Ryzen 5900X
64GB DDR4 RAM
AMD RX 7800 XT
I am very surprised the BIOS broke on you.
That is not something Fedora will interact with on an upgrade.
I wonder if you have a issue with the battery on the motherboard that keeps the BIOS settings alive? The way I detect this is to notice that the BIOS date and time resets to an old date if I fully power down the PC; unplug at the wall after a shutdown. You can also use a volt meter on the battery to check its voltage level.
I was also thrown when the BIOS started playing up because I too expected no interaction between OS upgrade and BIOS.
I hadn’t thought of the CMOS battery and having thought about it, it does occur to me that in all it’s years of use it hasn’t been replaced. It might be worth doing that, in the meantime it appears that flashing the BIOS has fixed whatever was preventing reliable booting at least.
As upgrading via command line, when I read this upgrade guide it said that going through Discover is “the recommended upgrade method for Fedora KDE.” is that different on account of F41 KDE being a spin rather than official?
It is on account of the people here on the Forums recommending it as we advise on the problems, as opposed to the general idea that in KDE, use KDE methods.
I mean, it’s Linux, there are so many ways of doing things
The KDE way of doing things should normally work. From experience here on Ask Fedora, go with the command line for as much as you can.
I thank you both for your thoughts and assurance. I made my upgrade today with no apparent issues from my BIOS, Discover did show an error when I checked for updates on the first f42 boot but it checked and updated when prompted.
The only thing that slightly worries me at this point, possibly just paranoia, is the black screen time between selecting it in grub and the Fedora loading screen along with the switching of my sound card. I can probably get used to that though, Windows also causes the sound card to switch when it boots.
