FC8 Upgrade fails due to incorrect fstab entry

[Handir]

I'm trying to upgrade from FC6 to FC8.
Graphical installer generates a warning that it cannot enable the swap device.
This seems odd, as the entries will have been generated by either FC5 or 6 during installation, and current FC6 installation seems to manage fine!
(FYI - FC7 upgrade installer behaves similarly)

Warning text is "/etc/fstab should be specified by label, not by device name"
Related /etc/fstab entry is "/dev/hda3 none swap sw".
I assume it needs to look like "LABEL=\SWAP none swap sw"

I found the e2label tool to change/add labels to ext2/ext3 partitions, but this doesn't work with swap partition. Can anyone tell me how to create a label for the swap partition device, to keep the installer happy?

[bingoUV]

As a workaround, don't mount swap during installation. After installation, F8 works with device names without problems. You can format a partition with swap filesystem using gparted.

AKAIK, bugs filed about upgrades are not fixed as it is not the recommended way of getting to a new version of fedora.

[JEO]

Use the mkswap command with the -L option to create swap partition with a label. Type man mkswap for the details.

[William Haller]

IIRC, there was a change in device names in going to the pseudo-scsi drivers about that time. Try changing to /dev/sda3 and see if it is happy. You might look do a search of the forum along these lines to see the exact sequence of instructions to use. I know that I was successful in doing upgrades from FC1 through FC8 on multiple systems, so if you follow the rules it will work. Haven't tried FC9 yet - waiting for KDE 4.1.

[Handir]

Thanks,

The mkswap -L seems to have solved that part of the problem, although the install seems to have hung whilst checking dependencies.

You could be right as the hardware detail provided by FC6 indicates the drives are hda1, 2 and 3 but I notice that the FC8 boot loader installer identifies /dev/sda as the MBR location and /dev/sda1 as the first boot drive.

The install appears to be going nowhere fast, so I'll probably stick with FC6 until I procure some new H/W.