Description of problem: The installer is not finding the existing installation of Fedora when the installation media is on the same partition as the root partition. How reproducible: always. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Have a previous version of Fedora installed (I used Fedora 5) 2. Download the installation disks to a directory under the root partition 3. Burn the first disk to a CD for booting 4. Boot installation CD using "askmethod" 5. Select the correct drive and directory when selecting location of installation media Actual results: When the installer searches for current installations of Fedora, nothing is found and the installer move onto the partitioning options. Expected results: The installer should find the current installation and give the user the option to upgrade.
I'm seeing the same symptoms with a slightly different setup. I used a bootable USB key with "diskboot.img" rather than a burned CD. Otherwise things are as in the original reporter's description. ISO images are stored in the same partition as the root of the existing FC5 installation. Anaconda does not find this existing installation and does not offer to upgrade, but instead goes down the new installation path.
I just had a friend that had the same problem. He had changed /etc/redhat-release to indicate ES because some third party package thought that was a requirement. He switched back to the original FC5 redhat-release file, and anaconda detected the installation as expected. There's no guarantee that this root cause is the same, but that's something that's easy to forget about months later.
Joseph - does your previous installation use reiserfs/xfs/jfs? Can you check on tty1, tty3, and tty4 and see if there are any obvious error messages?
I only used ext3. I have since upgraded the machine to FC6, so how can I check the other terminals for errors now?
Closing as CANTFIX per comment #4. For future reference, you cannot use the same partition as the source and destination for installation purposes. Your source partition is marked as protected once you tell anaconda that's where the source is. You have to use an entirely different partition for the installation destination.