ananconda upgrade won't mount partition

[Bob McClure Jr]

On Wed, May 11, 2005 at 08:13:57PM -0700, David Morgan wrote:
>  I want it to upgrade a copy of RedHat8 but Anaconda can't mount the 
> partition it's in, even though other software does.
> 
> The target hard disk:
> 
> /dev/hda1 - RedHat8 (whole filesystem)
> /dev/hda2 - swap
> 
> Whenever RedHat8 boots hda1 gets  mounted ; you can also mount it under 
> knoppix. Anaconda detects RedHat8's presence and  asks if I want to 
> upgrade rather than do a fresh install. Saying yes gets error message:
> 
>  "Error mounting device hda1 as /: invalid argument",
> 
> the conjecture the partition probably isn't partitioned, and an OK 
> button to reboot (no choice). At that point, if I  use the anaconda 
> feature to get an install log (ctrl-alt-F4) I see it tried to mount 
> /dev/hda1 on /mnt/sysimage. Then if I  use the anaconda feature to get a 
> root prompt (ctrl-alt-F2) and execute "mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/sysimage," 
> it mounts fine. But it's too late to proceed. The OK button will only 
> reboot.
> 
> This happens with multiple installation disksets (RedHat9, Fedora2, and 
> Fedora3). And with 2 different hard disks, the second a  functionally 
> identical (rsync'd) copy of the first. It happens with whichever 
> diskset, on either hard disk.

Please post the results of

  fdisk -l # that's "ell" as in list
  df
  cat /etc/fstab

> How do people perform upgrade-type installations?

I partition all my disks so that I can have two operational partition
sets, / and /boot for each, plus singles of /home, /usr/local, etc.
Then I copy the current operational / and /boot to the spares, adjust
/etc/fstab and mount points from the perspective of the spares, and
then upgrade that set.  If something goes sour or just doesn't work
right, I can fall back to the original / and /boot, and troubleshoot
the new ones at my leisure.

> Any ideas what's wrong in these cases of mine?

Not until we see the results of the above requests.

Cheers,
-- 
Bob McClure, Jr.             Bobcat Open Systems, Inc.
robertmcclure at earthlink.net  http://www.bobcatos.com
God is more interested in our availability than our ability.