Fedora 11 - A Quirk in Installation

I'm in the process of installing Fedora 11 on my various computers. So far the installation is going pretty smoothly, once I got over the first hurdle - filesystem layout. What they have done makes sense, once you understand it, but at least in my case, it took me a while to figure it out. Getting it figured out, though, is made somewhat more difficult because of a difference in behaviour between the Live CD and the Install DVD.

Here's the deal. Fedora 11 includes support for ext4 filesystems. BUT, it does not support booting from ext4 filesystems, which means that at a minimum, you have to have an ext3 /boot partition (or one of the other bootable types, of course), and then you can have an ext4 root partition. Of course, you can just forego ext4 altogether, and make a single ext3 filesystem for boot and root. Ok, fair enough, and this is the way that it works when you are installing from the DVD distribution. If you try to make a single ext4 partition, it says

"Bootable partitions cannot be on ext4 filesystems"

If you make a single ext3 partition, or an ext4 / and an ext3 /boot, it will install happily. The world is a wonderful place.

However, if you install from the Live CD, things go a bit differently. Trying a single ext4 parition produces the same error as with the install DVD, but trying a single ext3 partition produces this message:

"Your / partition does not match the live image you are installing from"

Hmmm. Finally, trying the other option - ext4 / and ext3 /boot - works with the Live CD.

I've just rechecked the Fedora 11 Release Notes, and unless I am overlooking it, I don't see any explicit warnings about this. The overview says that ext4 is "the default filesystem for new installations", but it doesn't mention the restriction of not being able to boot from ext4, nor does it warn about the limitation of the Live CD not being able to install to an ext3 roor partition.

I tried a couple of the Fedora 11 previews, and could never get them to install properly. Now that I see and understand this restriction, I know why that was happening. But the previews didn't have these checks and error messages in them, so they would just go off and try to install from the Live CD, and then would eventually either fail or crash.

As I said, once I got over this hurdle, the installation has gone smoothly. It is installed and running on the Dual Atom Nettop and the Core2Duo notebook, and it is installing on the AMD/ATI notebook as I write this. Once that is done I will move on to the Atom Netbooks. I will post results (success or failure) once those are all done.

jw 15/6/2009