Topic: 5.5 -> 5.6 upgrade fails

[Rick Jones]

I've been trying to upgrade my trusty 5.5 to 5.6, but after booting from the 5.6 CD-ROM, the installer searches for an existing installation, then says that some of the filesystems were not properly unmounted, and I should run fsck etc.

This is patently untrue, the system has been shut down correctly. I've even tried shutting down to single-user mode, and manually unmounting everything before finally rebooting.

It also says I can type "more options" in the subsequent box, but this crashes the installer. I want to avoid a complete re-install if possible.

Any suggestions on what might be going wrong here, or how to get round it?

TIA
Rick Jones

[Michael Smith]

you sure you have a good 5.6 install CD?  Check those md5sums ...

[Rick Jones]

Yep - MD5 all checks out OK.

The main difference with my installation is that I mounted a 2nd drive as /home/e-smith/files, so as to have max space for all the user data. But of course when the upgrade runs, this drive isn't mounted, so there's nothing in the .../files directory.

I've tried re-creating the key directories on the system disk, with the essential files, but that doesn't make any difference.

Does anyone know how deeply the installer inspects the previous installation on the hard disk? Does it for example look in /etc/fstab to see what the run-time mounts are?

Does it also look at all hard drives on the system? Is it just that there's another drive present that's upsetting it. Maybe I need to unhook the 2nd drive when doing the upgrade.

If anyone actually knows what the upgrade is looking at it might help me avoid spending hours experimenting

TIA
Rick Jones

[Charlie Brady]

Rick Jones wrote:

> I've been trying to upgrade my trusty 5.5 to 5.6, but after
> booting from the 5.6 CD-ROM, the installer searches for an
> existing installation, then says that some of the filesystems
> were not properly unmounted, and I should run fsck etc.
>
> This is patently untrue, the system has been shut down
> correctly.

My guess is that there is another partition on your second disk which wasn't shut down properly at some time in the past.

> Any suggestions on what might be going wrong here, or how to
> get round it?

Option 1: Remove the second disk, upgrade, add the second disk.
Option 2: Fix your second disk, perhaps by deleting any partitions that don't contain the files that you care about.

Charlie

[Rick Jones]

The weird thing here is that I explicitly mounted and unmounted (and fsck'd) the partitions on the 2nd drive before doing the upgrade.

I'll try disconnecting it and see if that makes any difference. If that's the problem the upgrader's being a bit pedantic!

Thanks
Rick