Description of problem: I'm testing an upgrade from FC6 to FC9 on a VMware machine. After installing FC6 and customizing several packages and system settings, I rebooting with the FC9a DVD and requested an upgrade to the existing installation. The upgrade process seemed to proceed normally. When I rebooted, the system started up with the FC6 kernel instead of the FC9 kernel and a large number of system services failed to start. Further examination of the issue showed that the /boot partition was missing from /etc/fstab, and appears not to have been mounted during the upgrade process. The /boot directory on the root partition contains the new kernel image but not the old one nor grub.conf; if I mount the /boot partition, I see it contains the old kernel image and grub.conf but the new kernel is not present. Here are the complete contents of the /boot partition (/dev/sda1): boot: System.map-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 lost+found config-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 symvers-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6.gz grub vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 initrd-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 boot/grub: device.map grub.conf minix_stage1_5 stage2 e2fs_stage1_5 iso9660_stage1_5 reiserfs_stage1_5 ufs2_stage1_5 fat_stage1_5 jfs_stage1_5 splash.xpm.gz vstafs_stage1_5 ffs_stage1_5 menu.lst stage1 xfs_stage1_5 boot/lost+found: and the contents of /boot on the root partition (/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00): boot: System.map-2.6.24-2.fc9 grub vmlinuz-2.6.24-2.fc9 config-2.6.24-2.fc9 initrd-2.6.24-2.fc9.img boot/grub: splash.xpm.gz Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): anaconda-11.4.0.28-1 How reproducible: Only tried once so far; the upgrade takes about an hour. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install FC6 using the default partition layout and most package groups. You may need at least 10GB of disk space. 2. Boot the FC9 Alpha install DVD and upgrade the existing installation. 3. Reboot after the upgrade is complete. Actual results: Booted linux 2.4.18-1.2798.fc6 Expected results: Should boot linux 2.4.24-2.fc9 Additional info: I tried manually copying the new kernel image to the /boot partition, adding /boot back into /etc/fstab, and adding a new entry for linux 2.4.24-2.fc9 to boot.grub. The system seemed to start okay, with the exception of the X server, due to an ABI version mismatch in the kbd driver. I'll check for a separate bug report on that. Also, the kernel-devel package appears to be missing from FC9, so I can't recompile the VMware tools.
Was /boot listed in /etc/fstab?
I assume you mean before I started the upgrade? Good thing I took snapshots of the virtual machine before upgrading. ;-) [trevin@fc9 ~]$ cat /etc/fstab /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 / ext3 defaults 1 1 LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2 devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0 tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0 proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0 /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 swap swap defaults 0 0
Reproduced the problem again while doing another test run for bug #424720 (upgrading with the 'selinux=0' option).
I managed to bypass this bug by manually mounting /mnt/sysimage/boot from VT2 while anaconda was checking installed package information for dependencies. By this time it had already overwritten /etc/fstab, so I re-added the entry for /boot as well. anaconda crashed near the end of the upgrade process, in File "/usr/lib/booty/bootloaderInfo.py", line 759, in writeGrub. On reboot, I was met with the "grub> " CLI prompt. The grub.conf file had been truncated. The good news is that the kernel image was properly upgraded on the boot partition this time. I suspect that the reason grub.conf didn't exist (on the wrong filesystem) in my first attempt is that the upgrade must have crashed that time too, only I didn't notice it before the virtual machine shut down.
I did an upgrade the middle of last week like this without problems :-/
Can you try this again with rawhide or the PR (which should hopefully be built/go out tomorrow)
I did FC6->rawhide ~1 day ago and it worked fine. Closing.
I wasn't able to download the PR, but I finally downloaded and tested the beta release tonight. The /boot partition was mounted and updated normally. Problem solved.