FC1 -> FC2 upgrade problem...

[Jeff Vian]

On Sat, 2004-07-17 at 11:11, Mike Cisar wrote:
> Have been having a major issue trying to upgrade from FC1 to FC2 and I'm
> hoping someone on the list may have some insight.  This server is running
> software raid1 with two identical IDE 20 Gig drives.  Tried to do the
> upgrade and the installer flashed a "inconsistant partition table... this
> error may safely be ignored... etc" message (only once, not twice as I have
> seen in the past when working with software RAID systems).  I ignored the
> error, and the installer chugs along, gets past "transferring install image
> to HD".  Everything seems to be going smoothly, then an error that the
> install has "terminated unexpectedly it is safe to reboot your machine".
> Luckily this situation has been non-destructive and when I reboot I'm back
> to my FC1 without any problems.
> 
> There are really no errors popped up on the screen indicating the exact
> cause of the error (and I can't see any install log gettign created
> anywhere), so I am making the big assumption that the error is caused by the
> partition table issue.
> 
> Being software RAID, I broke the mirror, zero-filled the drive, jotted down
> the CHS information the maxtor utility returned (32xxx/16/63), verified that
> these were the same numbers the system bios was seeing on auto-detect, hard
> coded them onto the kernel command line just to be sure.  Then went in with
> fdisk and created a partition structure and then re-added the newly
> partitioned drive into the mirror.  Once that was complete, I repeated the
> same process on the other of the two drives. 
> 
> Booted into the installer and got an exact repeat of the first attempt,
> including the partition table warning.  I'm really puzzled as to why
> re-creating the partition tables on both drives, with fdisk, under Linux has
> not resulted in a partition table that Linux is happy with.  Also puzzled
> that it is only complaining once, as if it's only seeing issue with one of
> the two drives (although the error message gives no indication of which
> drive it has issue with)... these are both identical drives, same brand,
> same model, same geometry reported by Maxtor diagnostics.  
> 
> Any suggestions are appreciated, I'd really rather avoid having to do a
> total reinstall on this system if at all possible.
> 
> Cheers,
> >>>>> Mike <<<<<<
> 
> 

Per your description above you are using the physical CHS configuration
on the drives.

As has been noted many times on this list, anaconda as used in FC2 wants
the LBA configuration for the drives.

I would expect that this is really the issue and that you might look at 
http://www.fedorafaq.org/#nodualboot .