I need to reinstall F34, but when I try to do it using Anaconda GUI, I can’t reassign / to the new installation. The scenario is:
/ and /home are existing Btrfs volumes
I want to preserve /home but reformat all the other volumes/partitions ( / , /boot and /boot/efi )
I can assign /boot , /boot/efi and /home to “new” installation, but when I try to assign / , this “You must create a new file system on the root device” appears.
How do I get past this? Any help will be much appreciated.
PS: IMHO Anaconda should handle this situation automatically, or at least communicate properly what needs to be done. I hope this has improved on F35
PPS: There is another thread about the same issue on the “on using Fedora” channel, but I believe this is the correct place for this question
… wait a minute, that guy seems strangely familiar…
I did remember I had this problem before, but for some reason I thought I was on a different situation now, because I was trying to create a new mountpoint for / and it wasn’t working, it was (rightfully) complaining that there was no space left on device. Now I understand there were two things I needed to do first:
I had to choose “Btrfs” as the fs type for new partitions (I was using the default “LVM”)
I had to first map one of the existing partitions to the target (new) installation, and then select this partition on the target; only then I would be able to create a new mount point for / on the target installation. (I probably did exactly this on that last time, I just didn’t remember it )
So, thanks for reminding me of my (smarter) past self
I am facing a different problem right now, but it seems unrelated: installation is aborting as soon as it starts downloading the packages complaining the filesystem is read only. Does it make any sense? Could it be a side effect of something I am doing wrong? Or has my SSD simply gone defective?
Not anymore The main reason for reinstalling the system was a weird crash (out of the blue the system crashed saying that it could not save a file because the filesystem was read only – precisely the same symptom I am facing now ). Based on some googling, I guess the disk is really gone
As I understand it, Btrfs is much more aggressive in marking filesystems on bad drives unmountable. If you need to, you may still be able to recover data. See:
I do have – somewhat outdated (I update them with every new Fedora release), but still, it’s better than nothing. I did manage to generate a new backup from the read-only fs before trying to reinstall, I will take a closer look at them once I have a chance, to check if they are corrupted (let’s see if Btrfs did a good job in preserving the data ).
I also did try to restore the data, but things were so bad that the command aborted with an error after a while But thanks for the pointer anyway
I already purchased a replacement SSD, let’s hope I have better luck with that one.
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The main reason for reinstalling the system was a weird crash (out of the blue the system crashed saying that it could not save a file because the filesystem was read only – precisely the same symptom I am facing now 
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