Fedora Core 4… Not yet :(

For reasons I don’t entirely understand, I have been unable to try out Fedora Core 4. I have downloaded it and successfully made the install disks and I can boot off disk one with no problem. The problem arises when I select which installation to upgrade. My setup isn’t entirely normal. I have two 120GB disks running off an ATA100 controller (so they are NOT hda and hdb) that are mirrored using software mirroring. So my root device is /dev/md0. That shows up as an option and has Fedora Core 3 detected on it, but when I click next, I get a dialog that looks similar to:

+-----------------------------------------------------+
|                   Duplicate Labels                  |
+-----------------------------------------------------+
|                                                     |
|  (*) Multiple devices on your system are labelled   |
|                                                     |
|                                       [ Reboot ]    |
+-----------------------------------------------------+

In the above ASCII art, (*) represents a symbol that looks like a critical fail icon.

What really confuses me about this dialog is that it doesn’t tell me what label is duplicated. I’m guessing this is some kind of bug because I have two physical disks that are identical in every way, but I’m not sure. I open bug 160622 on Redhat’s Bugzilla, but it got closed telling me that my RAID disks can not be labelled and suggesting that I remove the label. As far as I can tell, I have no labels of any sort, so I think I’m gonna have to reopen this bug. I’ve been poking around on the ‘net trying to find a solution, but having no luck. So for the time being, I’m unable to use Fedora Core 4… unless, of course, I install it on another machine.

UPDATE: 29-Sep-2005 – It’s installed and working!

6 Replies to “Fedora Core 4… Not yet :(”

  1. Are you using RAID and LVM? It may be that they are getting loaded in the wrong order. I use Gentoo so I don’t know much about Redhat but that was a problem a while back on the init scripts. I have exactly that setup and it works.

  2. Jake,

    Are you still having trouble with FC4? I found your site when I was have the same “Duplicate Labels” problem last night during my upgrade. I have two disks but no RAID and I was still getting the message even after all sorts of fiddling with e2label.

    When you get the “Duplicate Labels” reboot message and you Ctrl-Alt-Fn over to the consoles, what kind of error messages do you see? Anything to do with swap labels perchance? This is what I saw, and it led me to believe this was the real problem. I had two unlabelled swap partitions, one on each disk. After a few unnecessary missteps, I ended up doing a `mkswap -L “swap_a” /dev/` and `mkswap -L “swap_b” /dev/` and… presto! The upgrade could proceed.

    So perhaps your problem could be caused by this inability of anaconda to handle multiple unlabelled swap partitions and not a RAID/LVM issue.

    Just my $0.03… (includes $0.01 fuel surcharge)

  3. Jeebus,

    Thanks for the post. I actually just firgured that out on Saturday, though I got around it by deleting one of my swap partitions not by labeling them. I updated my bug at redhat.com to say that the problem seems to be caused by the multiple swap partitions not software RAID. I haven’t made a blog posting yet to announce my success, but I did have some :).

    I also didn’t know about ‘Ctrl-Alt-Fn’, I suppose that would have come in handy…

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