/ must be on a partition or LV that will be formatted. Reusing an existing / is not allowed.

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2011-10-17 at 21:09 -0400, Felix Miata wrote:
> On 2011/10/17 08:02 (GMT-0700) Adam Williamson composed:
> 
> > nodata wrote:
> 
> >>  "/ must be on a partition or LV that will be formatted. Reusing an
> >>  existing / is not allowed."
> 
> > I don't know, as I can't read your mind from here. But what it means is
> > that when you're doing a fresh install you have to format the /
> > partition. Not doing so has always been a very bad idea and unlikely to
> > work very well, but anaconda hasn't actively prevented you from doing it
> > before.
> 
> I always partition and format prior to beginning any Linux distro 
> installation. "Formatting" for this purpose includes formatting as many as 
> multiples of months or years prior, and simply deleting system directory 
> trees, like bin, sys, usr, etc, and preserving the partition's filesystem 
> type, compatible inode size, UUID, fsck age and device label for 
> compatibility with the other installed systems on the machine. It also 
> includes leaving selected config and data files behind so that they are 
> maximally handy for customizing the initial installation on first boot. If 
> the quote above means I can't do this any more, it means I'm done with any 
> not already installed Fedora releases. :-(

Yes, that is what it means. We can't sensibly expect to be able to
reliably install to a root partition with data on it.

I'm sorry if this is inconvenient, but it does seem a bit over the top
to issue an ultimatum like that. You can't always expect every cool
little hack you come up with to keep working forever, it's just not the
nature of the beast. There are many other ways to do this kind of
provisioning, often more robust and well engineered; why not use one of
those? I'm trying to think of the name of that Fedora-y one with some
sort of 'orange' theme...
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net