At beginning of install, filesys can't mount root
 

Hello All,

This is my first post, I look forward to learning a lot from this community!

I'm trying to get started with Fedora 6, and I'm having trouble during the install. I've searched around all day, no seriously, all day... no luck... Maybe someone can point me in the right direction?

Please excuse my terminalogy at times, I'm new to a lot of aspects of Linux.

I've downloaded Fedora 6 (Red Hat), and put in the install disk (1). As the kernel is installing (right?), I'm stopped at the following message:

crc error
EXT2-fs: unable to read superblock
isofs_fill_super: bread failed, dev=md1, iso_blknum=16, block=32
No filesystem could mount root, tried: ext2 iso9660
Kernel Panic - not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(9,1)

I researched and came up with some solutions:

1. linux acpi=off nofb
2. linux noprobe
2. the "garbage" trick - don't ask... didn't work
3. pci=nosort
4. Possibly a problem with my motherboard/chipset being compatible
5: see below...

After reading over the message myself, I think it has something to do with the hard drive. It had Lindows on it, so I put in GParted and partitioned the drive for the following (btw it's a 120GB drive):

-150mb ext2(Primary partion, first partition on the disk), this will be the boot drive, right?
-1 GB swap("Linux Swap" partition)
-20 GB primary partition ext2
-The rest is unallocated, I figured I would set it up during the install...

I'm thinking I may have to mount something when the boot prompt appears, but I don't know what?? I could be totally wrong... Is this the right direction? Thank you in advance for the help.

I don't think it's anything with your hard drive. During installation, a mini linux system is loaded into a ramdisk created on your system ram and mounted then run to do the install. That error message seems to indicate that the root filesystem on the ramdisk cannot be mounted for one reason or another so the installation cannot continue.

A few things to check. First, check the md5 sums of your downloaded isos to make sure you have good downloads. Next, try reburning at a slower speed. File corruption, either because of a bad dwonload or bad burn can give those kinds of errors. Check your system bios and make sure Plug 'N Play is disabled as this can also cause problems. Finally, it could be just a problem with the FC6 kernel; I've seen a lot of install problems reported with FC6 particularlly with certain sata controllers.

You may want to give another distro a try rather than fighting with fedora. Try some other installable livecds that use a modern 2.6 kernel like ubuntu, kannotix, PCLinuxOS and see if they run OK. That will give you a good idea of whether or not you have some motherboard/chipset compatability issue with the more recent 2.6 kernels they use. If those work, I would suspect some issue with the fedora kernel as the reason for your troubles.

Thanks for the reply. I've been on vacation, sorry for my slow reply. You were correct about the disks. My downloads were poor, so I redownloaded and burned slow. There were still problems once the install was complete... I've decided to install Gentoo. Now, I'm following the manual and I'm to the part about installing the kernel source. At first, I chose the gentoo-source
Code:
USE="-doc symlink" emerge gentoo-sources

This produced some error, so I retried, and now all I get is:
...Some feedback......... blah blah
oserror: [errno 30] read only file system

I researched some and found the umerge operand, but when I run:
emerge --umerge gentoo-sources
I receive the same error.

When I run any program, this same similar error occurs, "Read-Only file system".

I read that this could be due to a corrupt filesystem, and it suggested to run fsck, which I did on the /boot (hda1), but when I tried to run it on /, it said I must unmount first. I'm new to this Linux deal, so if I umount hda3, and then re-mount, I don't know how far back in the installation I'll have to begin, if any at all? Does anyone have any suggestions about the read-only file system? Merry Christmas!

Thanks for this piece of info
 

I washaving some problems but found out that it was the plug and play issue in the bios....

Thanks a million...

not sure if that's the whole of it. I have the same problems upgrading to FC6 on DiamondMax 21/500GB disks. I tried to increase my disk storage on a FC4 installation using SATA/300 500GB FreeAgent and found most of the disks from Seagate/Maxtor spin down after a point, causing Linux to remount in RO mode. I think it's all of the 500GB SATA disks regardless if internal or external. Been working it for two days now and think I'm going to go back to PATA or IDE style disks until the HD companies sort this out.

There are some workarounds on the web for updating installation and using these disks but they don't work with LVM (actually kills it).