Upgrading to Fedora 7: have your partitions labeled
Although “doing a clean installation and then restoring user data from backups is known to work better”, Fedora recommends to use CD/DVD installer to upgrade your Fedora Core installation to a higher version. I usually perform a clean install when updating Linux at home, this time however, I decided to let Anaconda (the Fedora installer) to do the job. I was very pleased with the overall result with one exception: the installer forced me to manually modify my /etc/fstab, refusing to continue otherwise.
Due to a change in the way that the Linux kernel handles storage devices, the device names like /dev/hdX or /dev/sdX may differ from the values used in earlier releases. In Fedora 7, for instance the first partition on my first disk (ATA) is now
/dev/sda1
instead of
/dev/hda1
and for instance the first partition on my second disk (SATA) is now named
/dev/sdb1
instead of
/dev/sda1
I wasn’t aware of this change before upgrading to Fedora 7. And because I had previously modified my /etc/fstab manually using the device names linked to the mount points instead of using labels, Fedora 7 installer now refused to upgrade.
The solution was to boot back to the original installation and to run “e2label” to create a label for each partition on your disk. It is pretty simple:
[ikendra@tank][~] sudo /sbin/e2label /dev/hda6 HOME
After that, modify your /etc/fstab to use the labels instead of device names. Example: modify the fstab line which used to be for instance
/dev/hda6 /home ext3 defaults 1 2
to
LABEL=HOME /home ext3 defaults 1 2
I recommend a single reboot to the original Fedora installation to check if all partitions were mounted as expected. After that, run the installer again, it will work.