Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 91554
Anaconda fails to update existing 9.0 installation to 9.0
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:53:59 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021130 Description of problem: I had attempted to make an exact copy of an exiting linux installation by identically formatting (partition using fdisk, ext3 using mke2fs and confirming via fsck) an identical hard drive then mirroring the existing linux installation onto the new drive via dump. Finally, I made the partition bootable (again with fdisk). I had successfully used this method in the past. Unfortunately, the new copy would not boot. Suspecting a hardware problem, I ran the mke2fs -cc option on every partion and found no problems. I repeated the mirroring via dump, and again could not boot. At this point I gave up the idea of copying the existing linux and ran the redhat 9.0 installion CD to build a new linux from the start. The new linux failed, teh log file of which is attached. After this failure, I moved the hard drive to a windows machine to reformat to NTFS, then again ran anaconda to reformat to the original configuration and finally succcessfully installed redhat 9.0 on the new drive. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Didn't try Additional info:
Created attachment 91937 [details] log file produced by anaconda
It would help diagnose the issue to have the /etc/fstab file from the system you were upgrading. The failure occurred trying to mount the '/' filesystem.
Sadly, the fstab is no more. Sorry I no longer have it, but I will try to describe its contents as I remember them: The first section was exactly as created by the anaconda installer. This all referred to hda (since only hda was present when that was first run). I copied the hard drive part of that first section and changed all the device names to explicit /dev/hdb's, and then made each of the hdb's non auto mounting. After I first ran into trouble, I suspected it might be due to some confusion between the hda's and hdb's. I next tried making all the device names explicitly either hda's or hdb's. Still suspecting confusion between the hda's and hdb's, I next tried switching all the a's and b's (i.e. switching which drives are not supposed to automount). None of these was successful, and I am afraid I am no longer really certain whether the file I sent was from the last or second-to-last try (which switch of hda's and hdb's). Sorry.
So to make sure I understand - you are now trying to do a fresh install of RHL 9 and got the error message above?
Correct. I was attempting a fresh install of RH9 onto a hard drive which had previously been formatted (ext3) by RH9. The problem was solved by reformatting the drive to ntfs, then letting anaconda again reformat to ext3.
This would have led to having duplicate labels on your filesystems. I've added a check to CVS that will prevent this from being a problem in the future.