hi all.

i recentley had problems with installing distros and setting up lilo.conf.
and in my travels i came across something wierd. i had to delete what
was a bad install so i used cfdisk. and in cfdisk my table showed that all my partitions where now reiserfs. the thing is that only one was installed with reiserfs. what happened here? this is very very strange. but after i reinstalled the distro again and not with reiserfs everthing booted.

thanks..

What distro(s)? How many partitions did you have, what filesystem were they, and which of them were meant to be reiserfs and which "became" reiserfs? What were the partitions that weren't supposed to be reiserfs actually supposed to be formatted as?

More information, please.

ok.

hda5 is mandrake and installed with ext3
hda7 is slack and installed with ext3
hda8 is knoppix

i originaly used reiserfs but lilo failed to boot it. when i looked at the partition table in cfdisk they were all coming up as reiserfs. this is what i do not understand. only knoppix was installed with reiserfs. but since then i have reproduced the error after i installed gentoo. the same thing was going on. i installed gentoo with reiserfs and it turned all my partitions into it. knoppix is now running fine and so is gentoo since i reinstalled and used ext3. what could be the error?

Well, about the only thing the Knoppix and Gentoo installs have in common is cfdisk.... and you.

To format (initialize) a partition as reiserfs under Gentoo, you have to specifically type '# mkreiserfs /dev/hd*'. I also have the Knoppix-based Morphix installed, and have installed Debian a number of times, so while I don't know precisely how Knoppix does it, I know that initializing a partition is always a separate step from setting up the partitions in cfdisk (or fdisk or whatever utility any given distribution uses).

So, normally, I would wonder if you had accidentally initialized additional partitions as reiserfs during one of these installs, except that that would have actually reformatted the other distros, and I suppose you would have noticed/mentioned that.

The only other possibility I can see is that cfdisk was displaying the wrong filesystem types, which I suppose is possible, but I find hard to believe. Maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part. Did you check the filesystem types from within Mandrake's Hard Drake as well as cfrdisk?

I found that the Morphix 0.4.0 release of three months ago didn't work right when installed to HDD as ReiserFS, but only as ext3 -- perhaps that is a problem that propagated from Knoppix, rather than a Morphix problem (but I haven't used/tried Knoppix in some time, so I don't know), and if that is the case, maybe that's what mis-marked your partition table.

I feel that there's some more information needed here to make this make sense, but I can't for the life of me think what it might be.

If everything is working, I'd not worry about it much until/unless you decide to install another distro.

to boot a resierfs u have to add notail to the opts section of the fstab file. atleast this is what it says in the gentoo install docs. it also says the boot partition shouldnt be reiser but rather ext2 or 3 but that reiser could be used.

i have mine setup as
hda1 = /boot = ext3
hda2 = swap
hda3 = reeserfs </root>
hdb1 = reiserfs </home>

and that works fine.