I wrote:

I'm trying to upgrade a 9.0 system to 9.1 over the network. I've made a boot.iso disk, booted and appear to have connected OK to the server. Yast has detected the exeisting system and I've asked it to update /dev/hda1 (which it says is 'SuSe Linux 9.0'). But then I get an error dialog:

Partitions could not be mounted. Check /var/log/Yast2/y2log

I used ctrl-alt-f2 to get a root console and at the end of y2log I see:

... Calling YaST client rootpart_proposal ... clients/inst_proposal.ycp:125 Called YaST client returned: $["raw proposal":["SuSE Linux 9.0"], "warning":"Failed to mount target system", "warning level":`fatal]

Earlier in the log there are the results of debugreiserfs which seem to indicate that it successfully detected a valid filesystem on that partition and others. (The 9.0 system does work! [most of the time])

Can anybody suggest what the problem is and how to get around it?

I'm doing the upgrade because the system has some SATA disks (hda is a PATA disk). The system is running OK in ICH5/BIOS 'legacy mode' but occasionally hangs under heavy disk load. I'm hoping the 2.6 kernel will enable me to run the SATA disks in native mode, reliably.

Thanks to some help off-list, I have solved this problem. It seems what is happening is the installer is mounting my root partition (hda1), reading /etc/fstab, trying to mount all the devices listed there, failing (I think because 2.6 kernel in 9.1 uses different device naming conventions to the 2.4 kernel in 9.0) and giving up. So using my root console session, I mounted /dev/hda1 on /mnt (the installer had unmounted it when it gave up). Then I edited /mnt/etc/fstab to comment out all the partitions on drives other than hda. Unmounted hda1, switched back to ctrl-alt-7 and told YaST to have another go. It worked !! :) Cheers, Dave