From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030717 Description of problem: During installation of RH9 over a previous RH7.3 install, the install process installed the kernel then hung. top reported that /usr/lib/rpm/rpmq was using approximately 99% CPU for over 12hours, until the machine was powered down. This occurred with both text and graphical installers. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Start RH9 install 2. Keep existing partitioning scheme (do not format /var) 3. Wait Actual Results: Install process stops after kernel install Expected Results: Install completes Additional info: As a work around, I copied files I wanted to keep from /var onto /home and chose to format /var. This allowed the installer to run to completion.
If you were trying to reinstall a new Red Hat release over an old one this is not going to work. If you choose to upgrade from a previous release to a new one then that should have worked. Which case is this?
I was trying to install a new release in place of an old one. I have a number of partitions /, /boot, /home, /usr, /var, I formatted /, /usr, /boot but wanted to retain some of the contents of /var so left it as was.
You will need to backup /var, intall and format /var, and migrate the old files over post-install.