From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.76 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.2-2 i586) Using graphical installer to upgrade existing 6.1 install. The installer didn't recognise an existing logical partition that was flaged as linux swap. It suggested the partition name of the existing 6.1 install. I thought it was going to create a swap file like other unixes do, so I said yes, and it proceeded to try and format a 400mb swap on my existing 2.2gb install. Although fdisk still saw the partition as a linux native, it was unreadable, and I ended up doing a new WS install Reproducible: Didn't try Steps to Reproduce: 1.existing 6.1 install. I had deleted and recreated the swap partition using partition magic. 2. booted up the 7.1 disc1, chose the graphical install, and the upgrade option 3. It didn't see the swap partition and decided to create one on my existing 2.2 gig partition Actual Results: system was scrod Expected Results: Install smart enough NOT to try and format an existing linux native partition as swap? I'm rating this high since it resulted in loss of data. That being said, this is probably not going to find a lot of people (I hope)
I'm not really sure what the problem is here. During an upgrade, if the installer detects that you do not have enough existing swap (about 2 times the amount of RAM you have), then it will create a swap file on the partition of your choice. The installer does *not* create swap partitions during upgrades, so I'm pretty confused by the behavior that you saw.
While making the swap file, it clobbered the partition and rendered the system unbootable and the partition unreadable. It was the only linux native part on the disk.
How much free space was available before it tried to make the 400MB swap file?
It would of been close to all the available space. Maybe even more. Not sure, and I don't have a good backup of the system just prior to the install. It was a "throw-away" install that I wanted to test the new version on.
Since you have reformatted the machine, there's not much hope of knowing exactly what went wrong. When you used Partition Magic to create the swap partition, did you reboot into the 6.1 system and run mkswap? If you didn't, the installer probably didn't know what to make of your existing partition table. There is a good chance that your partition table after using Partition Magic is no longer in sync with your /etc/fstab file. The installer probably got confused when it read an /etc/fstab file that no longer described the hard drive's partition table.
Closing due to inactivity. Please reopen if you have more information.