Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 10741
Signal 11 on upgrade 6.1 --> 6.2
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:55 EDT
I am getting a Signal 11 crash whenever I try to run a hard disk upgrade. It appears to occur when the stage 2 image is loading. Previously, when running 6.1, I had my harddisk partitioned as follows hda1: FAT16 hda5: FAT16 hda6: FAT16 hda7: Linux hda8: Linux swap Linux (RedHat 6.1) ran fine then. Then I converted hda1 to FAT32 (using the Win98 utility). Linux (6.1) still ran OK, and I verified that I could still mount and read hda1. Then I used FDISK to remove the hda5 partition (e.g., the first logical drive in the extended partition). LILO will no longer load Linux because the kernel is no longer on hda7 (because that partition is hda6 now.) I hoped to be able to upgrade Linux to 6.2, and change the size of the hda1 partition while I was at it. No dice, I get the signal 11 before I get very far. I haven't figured out how to use loadln to load Linux, which would allow me to change LILO's configuration. In any case, I don't think I should have received the signal 11 during the upgrade. Note: I gave this a "low" priority because I really won't loose much by doing a complete reinstall. (I will report whether or not I run into the same problem.) This might be a higher priority for someone else, though... Eric Schmenk
You are not going to be able to modify the size of partitions during an upgrade of Red Hat Linux, although I am not sure whether that is causing the signal 11 or not. There is a pretty good chance that the signal 11 is being caused by the fact that the upgrade routine is trying to mount the partitions listed in /etc/fstab and not being able to find those partitions because you have deleted hda5. This would certainly lead to a problem, as the upgrade routine is trying to bail out before doing damage to the underlying filesystem. There are a couple of ways that you can go with this. You can either try to use the rescue mode functionality of Red Hat Linux 6.2 to correct the problems in your /etc/fstab as well as /etc/lilo.conf and get the 6.1 system back up and running. Once you have this, you should be able to upgrade without any problems. The other route that you might take is to just install 6.2 fresh on the system. If there is really not that much that you might lose, then this is almost certainly the "easier" solution, as it requires the leasst amount of effort.
Correction: The Signal 11 occured immediately after the "Finding Packages to Upgrade" message popped up. This is a couple of steps later than I reported. I attempted to do a complete (fresh) install. Disk Druid reported the following partitions: HDA1 Win98 FAT32 HDA6 FAT16 HDA7 Linux HDA8 Linux Swap Note the gap in the partition numbering. Apparently, Disk Druid checks the /etc/fstab file also? Disk Druid would not let me change the size of HDA1 (which I wanted to remain a Win98 FAT partition), so I exited without saving any changes to the partition table. I then tried to run FDISK (RedHat's version), which promply crashed or locked up -- I can't remember which. So, I went ahead and recreated the HDA5 partition using fdisk (Win98 version -- which is also what I used to delete the partition in the first place), and formatted it using the Win98 Format command. Then the upgrade to 6.2 went OK. So far, the only problem I have noticed is that LILO seems to be ignoring whatever configuration information I specify using linuxconf. I assume this has been reported as a bug elsewhere. Personally, I would prefer that this bug report be concidered as an enhancement. I think the upgrade should fail more gracefully if there is a problem between the /etc/fstab file and the actual hard drive partitions. Why not print out the /etc/fstab file, at least? Eric