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I tried to upgrade my desktop system from SuSE 9.1 to SuSE 9.2, but it failed. I have a few drives on it:

hda / and /home
hdb /work
hdc /music
hdd CD-ROM/DVD-RW
hde /backup and /tv

(I know I need to put /home on its own disk, just not easy at the moment—either a 40Gb as it is now, or a 250Gb. Too much space for /home not isolated on its own disk.)

I was able to boot off the CD, pick the language English(US), and then select “Update an existing system.” (Why on the initial boot menu don’t they say “Installation / Upgrade”? I had to go through to see if it supported upgrading instead of just a raw install.)

It got to the point of trying to figure out my system and then complained, “Failed to mount target system.” It pointed me at /var/log/YaST2/y2log for the details. Tsk tsk, the GUI should let me see it there. I looked in the log, and saw that it failed trying to mount /dev/hdd1 as /backup. Hmm.

It looks like it saw the hde drive just fine (meaning the kernel has the driver for the Promise UDMA133 card that I use to let me have more than 4 devices), looking at the Alt-F3 screen where it initially lists the drives. But something in the scripts used to install messed up the idea of where the drives are. The original /etc/fstab is clear about mounting /dev/hde1 on /backup and /dev/hde2 on /tv. I’m not yet sure why it thought it was hdd (the CD doing the install). I didn’t expect a mistake like this.

The short-term fix will be to just comment out the /backup and /tv entries in /etc/fstab so that the install process won’t think that those partitions need to be mounted. Maybe tomorrow or next week, time to go to bed.