No playing. Better install a clean 9.0 or a clean 7.3. Since 8.0 there were several changes in filelocation. Maybe there are minor changes between 8.x and 9.0. So the better choice is to install a 9.0 from a clean hdd or format all partitions for your system.

i did these lab tests, cos i have a suse 7.3 production box, that needs to be upgraded to 9.0. so basically my experience was some of a catastrophy, cos the latest kernel patch for 9.0 ended up in rendering this system useless... any it was just a clean 7.3 install and a normal upgrade with 9.0 onto that. so i ask myself why doesnt suse give much more attention to these upgrade scenarios. btw, so what about this missing /boot/message file? where does that come from and how do i get/generate it? cos this system is now messed up and totally usless. and i dont want to kill the production 7.3 system in the same way. any ideas? thanks. andy