Wierd Anaconda

James C. Bevier jim at jbsys.com
Sun Jun 3 16:46:35 UTC 2007


I am doing an upgrade from FC6 to FC7 on an ASUS M2N-PLUS-SLI  x86_64 X2
motherboard.  It has two PATA drives and two SATA drives.  On FC6 PATAs were
hda & hdb, SATAs were sda & sdb.  On rawhide on the same machine, PATAs are
sda & sdb, SATAs are sdc & sdd.  Now when I boot from the x86_64 install
DVD, I select upgrade of the FC6 system.  Anaconda has it as sdc6?  If I
proceed , I get three errors saying: "Unable to mount filesystem".  " An
error occurred mounting device hda3 as /winxp.  You may continue
installation, but there may be problems."  I get one each for "hda3 as
/winxp", "hda5 as /win2k", and "hda7 as /spare".  These are FAT32
filesystems.  I selected continue each time.  The last error is" "Error
enabling swap device hda2.  No such file or directory.  The /etc/fstab on
your upgrade partition does no reference a valid swap partition."  The only
choice was to reboot!!  It seems to me it would be more appropriate for
Anaconda to allow the user to at least point them to the correct
drive/partition.  An update cannot be completed without further manual
intervention.  A normal user would be dead in the water at this point.

To get around this error I modified the /etc/fstab file to use LABEL=SWAP1
to use the rawhide swap partition, which was already labeled.  This is sure
making it hard for a person to upgrade a system.

Once I was updating, things went smooth until I was asked to install a new
boot loader.  I knew it was on the first PATA drive (hd0), that was hda on
FC6, sda on rawhide, and sdc on Anaconda???  I guessed to let it install on
sdc and rebooted.  There I find the system now has the PATAs at sda & sdb,
and SATAs at sdc & sdd.  Why does Anaconda see the drives backward of
everybody else?

To not get the upgrade errors, a user would have to label the swap area and
change the fstab file to mount by label.  Know that Anaconda was going to
reverse the drives during the update and modify the FAT32 partition entries
in the fstab file to use sdc2, sdc5, and sdc7.  And then edit the fstab file
again after update, before booting to point at sda2, sda5, and sda7!  Now,
did I get this half-assed update method correct??

Jim




More information about the test mailing list