My Fed 6 system which has been through the Fed 1, 2 .. 6 upgrades, reports

"Error enabling swap device hda3: No such device or address

Devices in /etc/fstab should be specified by label, not by device name"

during my attempt to upgrade to Fed 8. Here is fstab:

# This file is edited by fstab-sync - see 'man fstab-sync' for details
LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hda3 swap swap defaults 0 0

And here is what fdisk prints, so I know /dev/hda3 is ok:

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/hda: 300.0 GB, 300069052416 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 36481 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 14 36416 292407097+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 36417 36481 522112+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Command (m for help): exit

Is there some new fangled naming system which crept into fstab somewhere along the way, or can the installer really not see it please? Thanks.

Wonder if swap is any good.
With FC6 up run the following commands as root and see if errors happen.
/sbin/swapoff
/sbin/swapon

If no errors or complaints then I would be at a lost. If error happens then I would delete the partition and then recreate. Set type 82 for swap. Then format with mkswap command.

Brian

Swap was fine :-(
Can I frig this somehow just for the upgrade? It does seem to be just the contents of fstab it is complaining about. Id didn't say, but there have been absolutely no problems regarding swap or fstab at all, and its been running F6 for well over a year now.

There is a change to the way the kernel in F7 and F8 handles storage devices. You will need to label it.

Check out Disk partitions must be labeled in the release notes.

Bill

Why would they do this. I can't stand the LABEL= theory. I always go in and hard set the fstab to point to their true /dev point. Only reason when I used to have two identical disc in a system and made a duplicate for backup. Somehow it seen either both mtab files on each drive or something and tried to mount both partitions. So each drive had a partition labeled /var it tried mounting both to the same point. I can't do that and drove me a bit crazy for a minutes. Removal of the second drive resolved the startup to normal. So going into the fstab of the first drive and defining the true point I could then have both drives in at the same time and do the normal backup duplication weekly for a client.

Brian

Thanks! Well, /dev/hda3 has no label:

[root@tiger ~]# /sbin/blkid
/dev/hda1: LABEL="/boot" UUID="7a7349d5-a7fb-45a4-9025-a4a55d4228bc" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/hda2: LABEL="/" UUID="5548ab46-d775-4553-ae87-055cfe7fe19f" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/hda3: TYPE="swap"
/dev/hdb1: UUID="d9ed6b0c-a246-4f33-b607-f935af26d92b" TYPE="ext2"
/dev/hdc1: UUID="e42550aa-4f86-42f9-aa49-f05f7268cf82" TYPE="ext2"
/dev/hdd1: UUID="65e8420b-2829-4df9-8c14-3c993efa427e" TYPE="ext2"

But that article doesn't say how you label /dev/hda3 - any takers please?

Excellent info to know, I see they have changed everything to LABEL=/var ect...

I would assume the next RHEL6 version Enterprise will have the same label system since it runs a few behind Fedora...

Hey! He's moving from FC6, so he needs to change any /dev/hd.. references to /dev/sd.. since F7 and F8 no longer use the "hd" device names.

With that change to his /etc/fstab all should work well.

On the other hand, using the UUID=... form is more portable and should work in both FC6 and F8. Note that the UUID information can be found in /dev/disk/by-uuid/.

"man mkswap" - merely remake the swap with a label (-L) and update fstab to agree. LABEL and UUID have similar usage in this respect - RH chose LABEL, and you might as well stick with that.
UUID has it's own problems, and you won't get any help from the Redhat community for that.

All hard-drives are now called /dev/sda since the latest kernel 2.6 something I can't remember they call the drives this way.

I would avoid the UUID labeling and stay with Red Hat/Fedora naming conventions.

Also you can use e2label to name or rename.

In the end thats what I did, rebooted and the Fed8 install then carried on normally. Thanks.