Bug 123982

Summary: Upgrade fails due to "odd" partition
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Zenon Panoussis <redhatbugs>
Component: anacondaAssignee: Jeremy Katz <katzj>
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX QA Contact: Mike McLean <mikem>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 2   
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Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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Last Closed: 2004-06-08 19:08:33 UTC Type: ---
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Description Zenon Panoussis 2004-05-22 12:10:39 UTC
From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040126

Description of problem:
An FC2beta3 machine has an external firewire hard drive attached and
configured in /etc/fstab. Anaconda sees that but can't see the drive,
so it stops with the message "/dev/sda1 not found" and offers one
single option: "reboot".

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Attach and configure a firewire drive
2. Try to upgrade

    
Expected Results:  As long as anaconda can't recognise all kinds of
odd devices, it should offer the possibility "ignore and proceed" in
this situation.

Comment 1 Zenon Panoussis 2004-05-22 16:48:46 UTC
A closely related anaconda problem is in bug #123994

Comment 2 Jeremy Katz 2004-06-08 19:08:33 UTC
anaconda recognizes them if the post-install kernel is going to. 
Unfortunately, if we don't, then there's no good way to know whether
or not it's safe to continue.  Think about the case where someone has
an external drive mounted as /foo and ran out of space on /usr so
symlinked /usr/share to be under /foo.

The only safe thing to do at this point is to halt and not attempt to
do an upgrade.

Comment 3 Zenon Panoussis 2004-06-12 18:49:39 UTC
If the user clicks on "ignore and proceed", the user can be assumed to
know better than anaconda what's safe and what's not, methinks. Anyone
who knows how to symlink some extra space into /usr knows also that
/usr will be needed during the upgrade. 

Try a poll on fedora.redhat.com with the question "do you appreciate
RH taking your responsibilities for you and your choices from you?"
and see what people think. This approach is bound to frustrate admins
and experienced users, while the novice users it could benefit are all
perfectly happy with their Windows XP home edition.