On Jan 5, 2008 3:21 PM, Dave Cross <davorg@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I'm trying to do a new F8 installation on a system that is currently > running F7. Th system has two SATA disks. The first (sda) is 160 GB > and contains the boot partition, the swap and an LV which mounts /. > The second disk (sdb) is 320 GB and contains another logical volume > group containing two LVs, one for /home and one for /data. > > What I'd like to do is to reinstall onto / but leave all of the data > in /home and /data untouched. > > But when the installation routine gets to the section where it starts > to look at the disk partitions, it gives and error saying "The > partition table on device sdb was unreadable". And it then won't let > me set the mount points for the data LVs or mark them not to be > formatted. > > That doesn't seem to be a problem for the existing installation. That > can read the partition table without any problems. > > Am I trying to do something that you can't do? Is it impossible to > reinstall from scratch but leave an existing LV untouched? > > I'm worried about proceeding as I really don't want to lose the data > on this disk. And I don't really have the time (or space) to back it > up. I still don't know why I was getting the error, but some people might be interested in knowing how it worked out. As all of the data I wanted to keep was on one disk, I took the low-tech approach and removed the disk before doing the installation. I figured that the installation was very unlikely to be able to reformat a disk that wasn't attached to the system :-) That, of course, worked fine and I got F8 installed. And when I replaced the data disk, the new installation found it without any problems. I just had to create mount points and add a couple of lines to /etc/fstab to ensure that they get mounted each time the system is booted. Cheers, Dave...
