From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0 Description of problem: In the process of upgrading an FC1 system to FC3, I'm getting a fatal exception about the system being unable to open rpmdb (more details below). My system has a relatively small hard drive, divided into several 3-5 GB partitions: root@bester / $ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hdc2 4.9G 3.8G 802M 83% / /dev/hdc1 291M 17M 260M 7% /boot /dev/hdc3 3.9G 2.4G 1.3G 66% /home /dev/hdc5 2.9G 406M 2.4G 15% /data /dev/hdc6 2.9G 1.9G 911M 68% /usr/local /dev/hda1 9.5G 8.9G 650M 94% /win/c /dev/hdc8 3.8G 2.8G 1.1G 73% /win/d none 93M 0 93M 0% /dev/shm My root partition, as you can see, is very small, so I moved my /var and /tmp directories to the /data (/dev/hdc5) partition: root@bester /data $ ls -l total 32 drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Jul 21 2002 lost+found drwxrwxrwt 46 root root 4096 Mar 2 00:05 tmp drwxr-xr-x 19 root root 4096 Mar 1 23:15 var and then added relative symlinks to them on the root partition (/dev/hdc2): root@bester / $ ls -l ... lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 11 Mar 1 18:05 tmp -> ../data/tmp ... lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 11 Mar 1 18:05 var -> ../data/var ... When I tried to upgrade to FC3, I get an exception when anaconda first starts calculating package dependencies that ends in "TypeError: rpmdb open failed" (anacdump.txt is attached below). This is the step immediately after "Reading package information", but before it give you the final opportunity to abort the installation. I have no trouble accessing the rpm database booted into FC1, and rpm --rebuilddb doesn't help. Curiously, if I rearrange these directories by moving /tmp directly to the / partition, and mounting /dev/hdc5 as /var (moving subdirectories as appropriate), anaconda successfully completes this step, but the overall installation fails as I run out of space on the / partition (about 270 MB shy). My best guess is that anaconda is not mounting /data before attempting to access /var/lib/rpm. Clearly I'm somewhat pressed for space, and I often have to play games with symlinks to prevent partitions from filling up. Any suggestions on how I could get FC3 to install? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: See above. Additional info: This is an older system: a Dell Dimension L500cx (Celeron 500 MHz), 192MB RAM, two IDE hard disks (/dev/hda - Windows 98 SE - 10GB, /dev/hdc - Fedora Core 1 - 20GB).
Created attachment 111563 [details] Gzipped anacdump.txt (slightly truncated due to bad floppy disk)
Anaconda expects the contents of fstab to match your hard disk layout - have you tried bind mounts that should work - something like this in fstab rather than symlinks (remove the symlinks and create the dirs): /var /data/var none bind 0 0 /tmp /data/tmp none bind 0 0
Oh, I'm so embarrassed- my relative symlinks are wrong. I have them pointing like this /tmp -> ../data/tmp instead of /tmp -> data/tmp When the root device is mounted as /, this works as the '..' part is ignored, but if you're NOT mounting it there, well... I've changed it and will try the install again, but in any case we're probably safe in closing this one. Is there a SUBMITTERISANIDIOT flag?