Mageia forum

I have an old machine which is still on Mageia 7 which I want to update to Mageia 9

Updating is only supported to the next version, so I suppose I need to update to 8 and then to 9

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urpmi.addmedia --distrib --mirrorlist 'http://mirrors.mageia.org/api/mageia.8.$ARCH.list'

returns an error:

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Could not find a mirror from mirrorlist http://mirrors.mageia.org/api/mageia.8.$ARCH.list

You waited way to long to upgrade this machine.
You need to add a specific mirror which still provides the old releases.

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urpmi.addmedia --distrib https://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/Mageia/distrib/8/x86_64/

Yes, you'll need to find a mirror with the Mageia 8 repos. And then update to 9 after.
Ensure you run the update line at least twice to get everything to go through. And IIRC there was a big update to KDE on one of the upgrades, so you may get issues??

Oh, and I always run the version upgrade from runlevel 3, so the graphics server isn't running.

I ran the urpmi.addmedia command and followed the instructions in "Upgrading from Mageia 7",
running "urpmi --auto-update --auto --force --download-all" several times.

On rebooting I found that I could not boot into the backup root partition. This still has Mageia 7: a copy of the main root partition which I could boot into before updating.
I could still boot into Windows.
On booting into Mageia 8 I get the message "Building nvidia-current driver..." and then a blank screen.
I can bring up a shell with Shift-Alt-F2, but Shift-Alt-F7 gives a blank screen with a cursor.
The bios error messages (which seem harmless and which I always get on booting) switch to a smaller font: which I seem to remember happened when I first set up the machine and was using the wrong graphics driver.

On rebooting the message "Building nvidia-current driver..." still reappears and I still get a blank screen.

Many thanks to sturmvogel for the solution.

I think the upgrade to 8 is fine, apart from the Nvidia driver not working, so I will move the discussion to a more appropriate thread.

Thanks again sturmvogel!

It seems that there were some package updates which did not go through: after running another update using mcc from another machine I could boot into Mageia 8 with a working video driver.

Thanks!