I've been trying to update FC6 to F7 from a DVD image on my hard drive as described in the installation notes and CANNOT get it to work. Every time I get as far as telling it where to find the DVD image, as soon as I hit <Enter> it dies with (I think) "Install exited abnormally [1/1]" followed by a number of other shutdown-type messages, after which it tells me I can now reboot my system.

FWIW, I also tried to install off of the 'net, and it told me that I had a problem with one of my devices; I think that it was that some one or another of my partitions ("swap", I think) didn't have a label. I found a reference to this in some of the installation instruction files, but I can't find out how to put a label on said partition -- frustrating, since up until now I've been running just fine without a label on that partition.

On a side note: Does anyone have any words of wisdom re: updating vs. installing fresh? I've been using Linux since the (relatively) early RedHat days, I have yet to find a good way of doing backups, and I'd really rather not rebuild all of my various accounts, datafiles, etc. from scratch; on the other hand, I also understand the wisdom of leaving behind out-of-date apps, configuration glitches that never got cleared up, and so on.

I'm a little short of funds right now, so I can't afford to upgrade to a DVD writer, hence the need to use either the hard drive or the 'net install -- but, even if I did have a DVD writer, I'd still have the upgrade vs. new install issues. Comments?

Hello andymck,You probably know these things since you said you followed the installation documentation, but these are all I can think of to suggest: The ISO file must be located on a partition that is vfat, ext2 or ext3 and will not be formatted during installation. It cannot be stored on a partition in a LVM. Confirm the sha1sum checksum of your downloaded ISO file. Try installing from the Live CD.

You will probably receive various opinions. Mine is to not do version upgrades. While it may be inconvenient and time consuming to do a fresh install, you can read so many accounts of people wrecking their systems or wasting hours trying to fix broken things after attempting an upgrade. Consider a fresh install of a new version beside your current version. Multiboot them while you try the new version, rebuild applications, set preferences, migrate data, etc.

Yes, sorry I forgot to mention it, but I was using the Live CD, and sha1sum did approve both the DVD image and the Live CD image. I'm pretty sure I'm using either ext2 or ext3, but I'm not sure which as I don't pay much attention to how the file system works as long as it does; since I was trying to do an upgrade on the existing partition, formatting wasn't an issue. I'm not even sure what LVM is, so that's (probably) not an issue; I'm pretty cautious about not installing features I don't understand. Good suggestions, though.

I did find it interesting that, when I tried to install from the 'net, it did get further along, enough to complain about the missing partition label (if I'm remembering correctly and that's what it was). I should probably try that again.

I hadn't thought of multibooting, as I don't want to mess with my Windows drive and the Linux drive is more than 50% full; maybe I can figure out a safe way to do that (that is, a way that I think is safe; as I said, I'm cautious).

Thanks for the reply, and for the insights.

Hi Andymck,

I found out that F7 treats partitions different. To my understanding the difference is:
1. all diskdrives, whether IDE or SCSI/SATA drives, are called sda, sdb, sdc, etc
so no more hd.. drives
2. partitions are distinguished by their label, instead of their order on the drive. So the system doesn't look for sda1, sda3 of sda9, but instead it looks for the disklabel /boot1, /1, /usr1 etc.

So here is an opposite opinion:

I recently did upgrade from FC6 to F7, and it went relatively smooth all the way. The only issue was in the repositories: I had about 7 of them configured on my FC6 installation. But some of them were not yet ready for F7. Therefor yum complained about being 'unable to retrieve software information'. All I had to do to get things working was change the 'enable=1' to 'enable=0' in the configuration files. After that I could download 134 updates (!) and everything worked again.

I hope this is of some use to you...

I like the multi boot option, you can get second hand 10 -20 gig drives fairly cheap these days, (just look on ebay) if you're running out of room. Providing you're able to install a 2nd HD of course.

fwiw, I recently did an upgrade on my desktop from FC6 to F7 (I couldn't be bothered trying to work out what was on what partition) an d it was very smooth. Same issue as kobussie on the repos though. Not much of an issue.


Try the upgrade, but backup first. If it works, you're ahead. If not, it cost you an hour.

Huh. So, when you did your upgrade, did your drive(s) get assigned new "sd*" designations, or were they already "sd*"? I freely confess I know very little about how Linux assigns drivers, /dev/ entries, etc.; again, it's one of those things I don't worry about so long as it works, then research if I have to.

Also, how do I go about assigning a label to a partition that doesn't already have one? I've looked at info and man files for both parted and fdisk, but neither one has helped; the "Don't do this or you'll kill your drive" warnings make me too nervous to play, "... just try it and see what happens."
Where can I read up on repositories and their configuration files? So far I've just let yum do its thing automagically, but there are a few minor issues I'd like to clear up if I can find out how.