Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 123982
Upgrade fails due to "odd" partition
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:43 EST
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.
A closely related anaconda problem is in bug #123994
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.
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.