I have a machine with several Linux distros spread over 3 hard drives. It's been fine up to now. Grub allows me to choose which to boot, with no problems.

The Fedora 7 DVD arrived this morning, and I've been trying to upgrade my Fedora FC5 to Fedora 7. Whatever I do, I end up with a screen telling me
Multiple devices on your system are labelled /
It asks me to fix this, and reboot.

Is there a way to persuade Fedora to ignore the fact, and to upgrade the hard drive where FC5 now sits? I really want to retain those other distros and my settings from FC5.

Is this a new behaviour for installers? I installed Mepis a couple of months ago with no problem, and upgraded SuSe not long before that, likewise with no problems at all.

the fstab entries can either be by device name or by volume label. If you change your fstab entries to point to a specific partition instead of the label, you can get around this.
Or you may need to hide the other partitions from the installer, then edit the new versions fstab to use the device names, instead of the labels, then unhide the others.

Has this got something to do with the way FC7 is now labeling partitions?
If so a way round would be good, cause I'm going to be in the same boat when I install FC7

Not sure I follow the "hiding" bit. This is the fstab as it stands now (the forum software has stripped out most of the spaces, but the content is the same):

I tried with the first line #ed out; the installer still wasn't having any, but when I tried to restart Fedora I got a stream of error messages about "Can't find / in fstab or mtab"

I've got to go and do some work now (a rare event!) - should I comment out in fstab all the other drives, and leave just hdc1 and the swap drive?

Strangely, when Fedora first installed, it didn't put a / in front of swap in fstab - I assumed that's the way Fedora should be, and left it. It seems to have worked OK since.

Ho hum. I tried removing all but the first six lines of that fstab.
Still no joy. It looks like I'm destined to remain an FC5 user for the foreseeable future.

Is this a bug with "anaconda" which I see was in charge of the upgrade? I don't think I've come across anaconda with Mepis, Debian, Kubuntu, or SuSe.

change the first line from
LABEL=hdc1 / ext3 defaults 1 1
to
/dev/hdc1 / ext3 defaults 1 1

What is happening is that in fstab now, a partition can be referenced by the device, or the volume label. This makes it possible to move an install to a different device, or if the device order changes, the kernel will search for a partition with the volume label of /.
I think you have more than one partition on your system with that same volume label, /.
Anaconda detects this to be the case, and since it insists on making the root partition have the volume label /, and it knows that this will be unreliable, because the system will not know which / is supposed to be root, anaconda is telling you to change your setup.
That's what i think is going on anyway.

cfdisk will show the labels, but i don't know if it will let you change them. I'll try to find a simple way to do it.


this may work:
http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/...=7296&forum=27

e2label will do it for ext2/3 drives. it may do it for others.


reiserfstune does it for reiserfs.

http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man...rfstune.8.html

Anaconda is the installer - been that way forever with redhat.
Seems they demand labels to get around the libata change in 2.6.19.
Yuck !!!.
Good luck - this is the second thread I've seen about this in a couple of hours. And I still maintain it's going to cause all sorts of grief.

Nope. Fedora 7 install still tells me I have the same problem.

Rebooting to the existing Fedora with that as line 1 of fstab brought up an error "No local filesystem". I changed fstab back to the previous version and all is well again.

BASH tells me there's no cfdisk on the machine anyway.

Is anaconda's problem with the existing Fedora setup, or with all the other distros on the machine? If it means that Fedora won't co-exist on a machine with other Linux distros, then that's a pretty serious step in a wrong direction.

I'm not going to kludge the other distros, which are working fine. I've not had a problem updating any of those (so far).

I might try the steam upgrade method, using Yum. I understand that is doomed to failure, although I've read of some folks succeeding with it. anaconda seems doomed anyway

It's a pity, because Fedora has been pretty good - it does most of the jobs I want this machine to do. There are a few things it's not capable of, but between it (the default distro, and fileserver when needed), Debian (can write CDs), and Mepis (runs BOINC happily) I can do all that Windows used to do. Kubuntu and SuSe are "learning platforms" at the moment.

Is there a way to save the configuration and my desktop somewhere else, then install a "new" Fedora 7, then copy back the config and desktop - without losing a year's worth of setting etc? That would be an option.

figure out which other partitions are labeled /, and change them to something else, then upgrade your fedora. Then if necessary, change the volume labels back. I'm not talking about the entry in fstab. I'm talking about the volume label which is on the partition with each filesystem.

That's the way to get fedora to ignore them.

Ah! Indeed! I'd been poking around and found that the individual partitions had labels (which I've never seen before!)
hdb1 and hdc2 were both labelled /
hdc1 (the Fedora partition) was labelled hdc1
hda5 is labelled hda2; hdc6 is labelled hdc6.
The rest had no labels.

They're now all labelled with their hdxn address.

That got Fedora past the / objection.

anaconda now reports an error mounting device hdb1 as /mnt/hdb1.
I'll fix that for the time being by removing all the other distro drives from fstab.

I notice it wants to call hdc1 sdc1 instead - not sure why that is.

Off now to see if I can get it to upgrade...

That's the libata (kernel) change.
And the reason for all this hoo-haa re labels - according to Fedora, you weren't supposed to even notice.

As if ...

Well, that worked - I think.

After several more false starts, with it wanting other problems fixed, and in sheer exasperation, I removed virtually all of fstab, and changed hdc1 and hdb5 to sdc1 and sdb5. With that, it passed the initial setup screens.

It's just passed 800 of 1035 packages to install, after two hours of chuntering.

The secret to get past the anaconda's coils is:

1. Change drive labels
e2label /dev/hdxn for each hard drive and partition.
If e2label /dev/hdb2 brings up any other response than hdb2,
then
e2label /dev/hdb2 hdb2
.. and so on.

2. Before it's too late, check that the machine will still boot
If not, change 'em back.
My Mepis installation wasn't too happy, and complained about missing root drive, but it worked (more or less). Once Fedora's updated, I'll change the Mepis drive back.
Reiserfs partitions don't respond to e2label, but it seems not to matter.

3. Edit /etc/fstab, and change all instances of hdxn to sdxn
hdb1 becomes sdb1 - for reasons someone might know, but it beats me.
I used to regard the "s" as signifying SCSI, but hey ho.
In my case, not having worked that out till too late, I just removed everything that wasn't for Fedora. I foresee a fun time later putting them all back.

4. Run the Fedora install, and choose "Upgrade existing Fedora"

Go to bed, and look again in the morning. It's 2am here, and that's where I'm off to.

reiserfstune --label
will let you change the volume label for reiserfs partitions. I did a couple of them.

The upgrade finished at some ungodly time of the night, and Fedora is back up and running (sort of).

The sdc instead of hdc thing is only in /dev/. The list in /mnt/ still wants them called hdc etc.
Guess how I found that out!

"Link to device" on the desktop to go direct to different drives no longer works. For the Fedora drive, it gives an error message that the drive is already open and missing a "Dev=" entry. For all the others it tells me that only ROOT can mount. I've done the standard chmods that have to be done to "mount" and "umount", but to no avail.

QTParted and GParted have both stopped working. I assume they no longer exist in FC7. That makes it harder to see what's happening.

STILL Fedora can't actually do anything with my SCSI drives. It sees them, but can't open or read them. K3b sees the CDRW but says it can't write. (All works fine in Kubuntu and Debian; Mepis can't even see the SCSI card).

Apart from that, there's nothing visibly different in FC7 to what I saw in FC5.

It's early days - perhaps there are good things lurking, waiting to be found. Thus far, I wish I hadn't bothered.

Well, I wish I hadn't done that

The two things I'd hoped to fix, the non-working SCSI drives, and the need to type the Root password every pesky click of most of the stuff I use, still aren't sorted.

But now, a whole bunch of other stuff doesn't work. So far, I've found these are dead:
- QTParted
- Gparted
- Yum
- Yumex
- Skype
- XMMS
- Kopete
- Rosegarden
- Totem Player
- Logical Volume Management


Worst of all, Fedora is no longer accessible to the network, so the machine's primary purpose (fileserver) is unavailable. Fortunately, I've got Debian on it and that's still fine as fileserver.

I'm sure a few hours of digging and Googling will fix most of those, but it's a pain in the neck when an "upgrade" kills most of the operating software.

There's a new software manager in Fedora 7 called "Pirut" but when I run it, it tells me there's no network connection. Since I'm using Firefox to post this, I think it's maybe not trying hard enough.

Anyone who was thinking of upgrading to Fedora 7: right now, I'd say don't!