Cannot upgrade from FC6->F7. No upgrade option given in install screen. (and RAID remnant)

[Jim Cornette]

Lou Spironello wrote:
> Dear Jim:
> 
> Please forgive me for not responding sooner.  I began this reply the day 
> you sent me the message and got sidetracked.

That's alright, I have been wading through the current message load 
regarding other problems like esd. So far, none of the other mentioned 
problems effected my systems.

> 
> Thank you again for your lengthy, well thought out, consistent and 
> technically sound response!

Thanks!

> 
> I apologize if my responses were not clear.   I beg you for great 
> forgiveness.

No need to apologize, my responses are somewhat vague when asking for help.

> 
> Again, all me methods I've used and you've suggested have been taken
> because I've been under the assumption that anaconda saw remnants
> of past lvm or raid devices based upon the docs in the installation guide
> and I believe in the release notes.

Those that prepare the release notes have tough jobs. They also have 
users, me included which do not read the content until they encounter 
the problem and solution written up in the release notes.

> 
> I thoroughly read the article at www.issociate.de 
> <http://www.issociate.de>.  I found a slew of pointers
> which I can possibly use in the future and I tried to use some of the mdadm
> command suggested there.   however, since there are no physical 
> partitions associated
> with the raid device /dev/md0 mdadm will not operate on that device.

Interesting, I assumed the raid information was kept within the device 
used for raid. Raid sounds more complex than I thought it was with my 
very limited knowledge of raid.


> Moreover
> the partitions originally associated with the device have been deleted.

I would think the information would be dynamically removed if the 
partition had no reference regarding the raid or the user prompted as to 
incomplete references for a raid array.

> 
> I've run find on my udev directories looking for "md" but nothing 
> appeared relative
> to raid devices.
> 
> I have also noticed a complete md0 tree located in /sys/block/md0 and I 
> suspect
> that anaconda might be reading that and thinking that an raid device exists.
> 
> re: the 4GB split on files.
> I'm assuming that was mentioned with the intent to burn to a DVD.
> I don't have a DVD burner nor a CD burner on my linux box.  My cd
> burner died a while back and I'm only using a CD reader.  I only have
> a CD burner on an older windows box.
> 
> Thanks for the info regarding the incremental label naming of partitions, 
> i.e. /usr1 etc.

They should work out better if you had to use pre-F7 kernels like some 
postings referred to.

> 
> Re: the reference to the f7-updates.img.
> it apparently found it across the net when I specified it
> on the command line since anaconda prompted me for the IP address
> of this local machine along with the gateway and dns which were both my 
> local
> router.  I'm assuming that since I didn't receive an error after that that
> the f7-updates.img file was used but I'm only guessing.

I never used one of those images yet myself. I just recall some step 
allowed updates to be selected during install.

> 
> Again please forgive me.  The fstab I included in the previous e-mail 
> did not have label references for partitions on drive /dev/hdc or /dev/hdd even though 
> partition labels do exist for all parititions.
> 
> Well, I changed the physical device references for all partitions on 
> /dev/hdc and /dev/hdd,
> neither of which have any OS software, and voila!  I rebooted with the 
> rescue
> CD and I eventually received the install / upgrade window!  Hmm.  I think
> there should be some mention in anaconda as an informational message
> or as an error message flagging that as a potential "non-install" issue.

It would be great for anaconda to provide such information as possible 
causes of problems. If one knows they have an OS on their system that is 
not recognized, maybe a manually enter information on other installed 
but not detected OS versions would be useful.

> 
>The upgrade continued from there until it reached the
> selinux-policy-targeted rpm at which point it appeared to have
> stalled. I checked the drive light and apparently there was disk
> activity and I assumed that selinux-policy-targeted was changing file
>  attributes or assembling policies for selinux, so I waited. 

Good choice, SELinux restoring file content sometimes taks awhile to 
complete. I almost aborted installs because of the delay but found 
restorecon or a similarly named process active so waited.

> I was 
> tempted to do a hard reset but I resisted. 1 1/2 hours had already
> passed and the install was not finished yet. More than 2 hours later
> and the install finally finished. The machine rebooted and I received
> an error, in that it couldn't find my F7 install. So I rebooted again
> and explicitly selected the F7 option from the grub boot menu (there
> was only one other entry, that of the FC6) and the F7 boot continued
> from there. 

I recall hearing others encountering the fc6 kernel being removed but 
the entry for the older kernel was not removed from the menu on earlier 
postings. I assume this is a bug. I cannot recall if it was for xen 
kernels or all kernel types that were effected by the bug.

> I was then presented from pirut with over 975 upgrade
> packages. So I spent most of Sunday wading through those. I'm now
> checking through the package manager to ensure check for other
> installs. I still have to wade through my rpm list for legacy fc6
> rpms that F7 didn't remove.

I guess there is an ption for yum to --show-orphans. You might find this 
a useful feature. On one of my upgraded systems I still had up2date 
installed and nly removed it because of conflcts during upgrades. I 
usually don'r remove orphans unless they cause problems during upgrade/ 
updates.

> 
> Thanks very much for your help.

No problem, I am glad that you finally were able to upgrd via the 
installer. Enjoy F7, hopefully without a lot of problems now tht it is 
installed.

Jim

> 
> Regards, Lou
> 

> 


-- 
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers.  What they
really hate is lousy programmers.
- Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in "Oath of Fealty"