[I previously sent this to psyche-list by mistake.] Background: I am trying to upgrade 8.0 to 9.0. (BTW, I have a subscription but had to use BitTorrent as RH's servers were too slow). I have /boot ext3 on /dev/hda1 and a matching /spare on /dev/hdc1, not as a raid. Everything else is RAID 0 with /dev/md0 ext3 /home etc. RH 9 appears not to understand the existing RAID partitions: in my analysis, it fails to start and stop them properly, and fails to recognize the disk geometry in the presence of RAID arrays. Detail follow: First Upgrade Failure: I ran the text-mode upgrader and at time of installation it said I was out of space on /boot, so I did ALT-F1 and deleted old vmlinux files. When I pressed OK, it ran for a few seconds and got a SIG 11 and rebooted. When it came back up, it could not find the RAID partitions. Looking at /tmp/syslog showed me that it refused even to put them together. I could not run fsck or assemble the file systems as is, so I ran fsck on just /dev/hda* and let it remove the journal and conver them to ext2, because I was desperate. I was then able to use "mdadm --assemble --force /dev/md? /dev/hda? /dev/hdc?" to force it to re-assemble the partitions. A few hours later, I had all the lost directories put back together (lost /dev, /etc/sysconfig, /usr/lib), with a few parts left over, but it booted and ran RedHat 8.0 again and appeared to be mostly back to normal. Second Upgrade Failure: I re-ran the text-mode installer and it again got a SIG 11. I would suspect hardware problems except that the machine normally runs reliably. I copied all the data off to a separate disk and commenced an install from scratch, without repartitioning. First installation failure: RH 9 wanted me to increase /boot to 100MB, which I did by reconfiguring /dev/hda1 boot and the RAID 0 next to it (/usr). I realize that the /boot size was only a recommendation but since my first failure was because of a small /boot, I decided to fix it, since I had to trash the data there anyway. Second installation failure: Here is where things get really bad. When I re-created the RAID 0 for /usr, the wizard said it was "Raid Array 0" but said the other RAID devices I had left untouched were /dev/md0, /dev/md1, etc. When I then tried to continue the installation, it insisted on putting the boot record in the first /dev/md? in the list, which I think was /dev/md0, which happened to be /home made of /dea/hd[ac]8. Obviously, that was not going to work, but there were no choices. Third installation failure: I went back and deleted all the /dev/md? RAID 0 and re-made RAID 0 with the RH 9, and made a RAID1 out of /dev/hda1 and /dev/hdc1 (which had been kept as /spare), since it appeared to want that for /boot. Sadly, it again offered only "RAID DEVICE 0" which was the first one I made (again, /usr on /dev/hd[ac]8) as the only option for placing the boot block. I guess I will now go and delete the RAID devices again and make sure to create the RAID 1 for /dev/hd[ac]1 as the first RAID device I create. But I'm not impressed.
