Manishevitz. I made the mistake of trying to use yum to upgrade from FC6 to FC7... Someone said it would work without a hitch. Anyway, it... didn't. So I built an FC8 install disc and tried to just overwrite the /boot and / partitions (leaving the /htpc partition intact, with all of its precious, sweet data). The installer borked trying to mount the /htpc jfs partition (AFTER formatting / and /boot), leaving me with no OS. So I tried reinstalling FC6 from the original disc and ran into the same problem (!??). Note that this was a process I had repeated many times in the past while bringing this machine up, and it never had a problem mounting a previously-existing jfs partition. What have you done, yum?

So now I'm just installing FC8 without trying to mount /htpc, hoping I'll be able to manually mount it later. Then I can just samba share everything over to the arcade machine, nuke the jfs partition, and reformat with something sensible like ext3. What was I thinking using jfs?? Jarod Wilson made me do it.

Summary for non-computer folks: my home theater computer is being a pain in the ass and there went my evening.

Update: I can install FC8 with jfs support (using linux jfs at the boot: prompt), but mounting the existing partition always fails for unspecified reasons. Anyone have any ideas why? There's some data on that partition that I'd sure like to not lose.