From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; de-DE; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050720 Fedora/1.0.6-1.1.fc4 Firefox/1.0.6 Description of problem: Note: This is a bug report with solution, so you can close it immediately. Since we found a few obviously related bugs still open, we hope this helps to resolve those bugs. We were trying to update from a FC2 installation to FC4, but FC4 was unable to find the existing installation. After trying to install with the "upgradeany" option the root partition was found. There was a warning saying /etc/redhat-release could not be found, so we investigated a bit more. The problem is, that on our installation, we dont know why, /etc/redhat-release is an absolute link to /etc/fedora-release. During the install process the current installation is mounted to /mnt/sysimage and then the absolute link can not be resolved and the file is not found by anaconda. The solution is simple, just relink redhat-release relative to fedora-release and everything works as expected. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. boot from FC4 boot cd 2. use text or graphical installer 3. answer the following question until FC tries to find existing installations Actual Results: Anaconda does not find existing installation and offers only fresh install Expected Results: Anaconda finding the existing installation ... Additional info: We are not sure but we think the FC2 installation was a clean install, meaning that the absolute link may have been created during the FC2 install. Since anaconda seems to be only looking for the redhat-release file, it might be better to also look for the fedora-release file if redhat-release can not be found.
Absolute symlinks will screw up a number of things on an upgrade since the root of the filesystem is mounted under a chroot. There's, unfortunately, not a lot that can be done to work around that :(
(In reply to comment #1) > Absolute symlinks will screw up a number of things on an upgrade since the root > of the filesystem is mounted under a chroot. There's, unfortunately, not a lot > that can be done to work around that :( As I said, wouldn't it be better to not only look for redhat-release, but also look for fedora-release too, if the redhat-release file can not be found? Looking at the code this is currently not the case. It is only a few linces of code in the scripts of anaconda and will save you guys from a lot of strange bug reports ... I would also be happy if Red Hat/Fedora could make sure that the absolute symlink was not actually created by the installer.