CentOS-7 Re-install

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Ok, how is this supposed to work? I have re-installed CentOS-7 over the first install. On the “Installation Destination” (JHC can they make these name any more pretentious? What happened to boot disk?) I have exactly one ATA WD5000. I chose ‘I will configure partitioning’. On the Manual Partitioning page I
see the previous installation file-system. I select each of the mount points and delete them using the (-) button (said metaphor also lifted directly from Apple OSX). This gives me the entire disk back. I then add mount points for
/. /swap, /var/log, /tmp (probably unnecessarily but force of habit will out), and /var/spool (no users so no /home).

Now when I reboot I get nothing but a flashing underscore in the top left hand corner of the monitor. Nothing else.

What gives?

4 thoughts on - CentOS-7 Re-install

  • I booted from the liveCD simply to see what the regular installer had done to the HDD. Eventually I did install from the liveCD and that has allowed the system to boot from the HDD again.

    I am sort of perplexed as to why there is no simple provision to reuse the entire disk as I recall was the case with previous versions of CentOS. Why the laborious requirement to delete each mount point from an install one wishes to remove entirely?

    In any case, I have gotten past the difficulty and have built zfs for
    3.10.0-123-9.2. Now to see if I can figure out how to rebuild the system using zfs.

  • Hi James,

    From an old email of mine to the list.

    No but I sorted it out myself. I just took a chance, it was on a test server anyway ;-)

    In the disk partitioning screen you will see the old 6.5 installation. Clicking on it will bring up the existing 6.5 partitions. Then select each of the existing partitions and a configuration menu comes up which allows you to reformat the partition if required. So just don’t reformat the partitions you want to keep .They then become part of the new 7.0 installation.

    Hope this helps.

    Regards, Tony

  • That is exactly what I ended up doing. It just seems a little odd to me to require that amount of manual effort when one wants to reuse the entire disk for a fresh install. I seem to recall that in 6.5 one could simply tell the installer to do exactly that.

    In any case, somehow I experienced the situation that, even though I had
    ‘deleted’ each of the old mount points, the CentOS-7 installer would not reuse the original boot partition space but instead created a new one. I am not sure what was going on or what I did that caused this. In the end I rebooted from the liveCD and used the disk utility to manually remove all of the partitions on the HDD and then re-installed from the minimal DVD. That seems to have returned the partition table to something I am more comfortable with.