Bug 5536

Summary:	Can't find previous RedHat install (6.0)
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	Steve Tate <stephenrtate>
Component:	installer	Assignee:	Jay Turner <jturner>
Status:	CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	6.1	CC:	srevivo
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	1999-10-20 16:38:42 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Steve Tate 1999-10-04 23:12:01 UTC

I tried to do an upgrade to 6.1, and while I have a fairly
straightforward RedHat 6.0 installation, the partition setup
is a little funky -- my root partition is /dev/hda7, and
when it gets to the part where it looks for the previous
RedHat installation it gives an error message about mounting
/dev/hdd1 (which is actually half of a RAID-0 setup), and
then bombs out with some python exceptions.

If there was a way I could *tell* it where the old
installation was, all would be cool, but I don't see any way
to do that...

Comment 1 Ian Macdonald 1999-10-04 23:15:59 UTC

See also bug #5511. These are definitely related.

Comment 2 Steve Tate 1999-10-05 20:16:59 UTC

I have a workaround for this now, but it's a bit ugly because there
are in fact TWO problems!  First, when looking for the previous
install, anaconda tries to mount anything that is labeled as a ext2
partition --- and if the mount fails the exception stops the install
cold.  That seems like a huge overreaction to me -- if the mount
fails, you should just ignore the partition.  With my RAID-0 striping,
it failed the mount, but that's not a big deal -- that's obviously not
my root partition, so it should just ignore it and go on.

The work-around:  relabel (temporarily) all such partitions as
something obscure (I used "amoeba") so they are ignored.

Unfortunately, that didn't fix my problem because there is a second
problem caused by a bug in the anaconda code.  In particular, there's
a case statement where a "break" is missing, so NTFS partitions are
mistakenly identified as ext2 partitions!  So the mount once again
fails, and the exception stops the upgrade. I'll send a patch that
fixes this, but for now the workaround is the same as before:
temporarily relabel the NTFS partition(s) to something other than NTFS
or ext2, and then try again...

Comment 3 nd 1999-10-05 21:30:59 UTC

See also <a href="http://developer.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?
id=5555&BUGLIST=5555">bug #5555</a> for more info on this.  It
appears to affect all systems with existing NTFS *AND* HPFS (OS/2)
partitions.  This is probably because (I think) NTFS and HPFS utilize
the same partition ID type.

Comment 4 Jay Turner 1999-10-20 16:38:59 UTC

Discarding as bug contains information also found in #5555 and #5511;
see those bugs for more information