i installed REd HAt 9 on an old system of mine....10.2 gb,256 mb ram ,p3
it went along smoothly,and i formatted the hard disk into 4 partitions
/
/home
swap =500 mb
/boot ==200 mb

now when i try to login,it just returns the same login screen to me.
if the pass word is incorrect then it displays a wrondg password error...
i changed the inittab file to change the default run level to 3
but the same thing happens there too...
also,i installed the kerberos thing during the installl

do tell me where to go now,
dhananjay

Something like that happened to me with Slack on my lap-top, several days after installation, but only when I log as user, and only for the first time I try to login after restart - so I had to go trough log screen twice and everything would be just fine. After few days problem disappeared, I don't know how.

I'm presuming that you've tried
?????

Or if you are in an init 3 login screen try logging in as user or root. If you can get in as root (or user), try

as that should then tell you where on the system you're logged in.

regards

John

hey thanks guys...
bigjohn...the thing is i cant get beyond the login stage...
the login gives me another login...
so,while i was waiting for a reply i tinkered with fdisk
using linux rescue with a boot disk.
/home had a win 95 fromat...
deleted this...
then created a new partition fro fdisk
changed the fstab file....but it says this partition is corrupt...
so i m going to reinstall now

dhananjay

Well vrdhananjay, that sounds like the best thing to do.

Though you're heading in the right direction by the sound of things. Inasfaras having a seperate /home partition, because if you set stuff properly from the outset, it saves you a hell of a lot of aggrevation later.

If you're just going to have a linux only machine then ok, but if you're going to dual boot, I feel that it's often a smart move to have the seperate /home formatted for whatever you think is good (my /home and /root are both reiserfs as it seemed like a good option when I was looking into gentoo in the first place) ext2 or 3 (I'd say 3 - though I don't recall why - journaling I think??) and a different one that mounts at boot that is formatted as fat32, that way you don't have to worry about the emerging disc write ability for NTFS partitions (winXP), and both OS's can (well, should be able to) read/write to the partition for any data and stuff that you may like to use e.g. stuff like mp3 etc etc.

Currently I have
hda1-winXP (primary)
hda2-/boot (primary)
hda3-linux swap (primary)
hda4 is extended into

hda5-/root (logical)
hda6-/home (logical)
hda7-/fat32 (logical)

partitions, and that's on one hard disc.

The bonus of having seperate /home, /fat32 and /root is that if I want to re-install or whatever, I only have to install/re-install/format the hda5 /root partition and I don't loose any data

Maybe that helps a little ???

good luck

regards

John

hey LQaddict,
it dint go off so well...seems like the hard disk is corrupt...i did a lotta fdisk-ing,nothing wrong i m sure...but seems not to work even with autopartition option in the install...
anyway,this was the first time i tried a different /home partition(ext3,is reiser good?) cos i heard it is a good damage control practice.
my primary comp(i was installing on my old comp for fiddling with RTAI and the parellel port) has
sda1 xp- ntfs
sda4,5 -fat32
hdd0- / ext3
and a swap partition... have two seperate physical drives,so no issues there...
i just mount the fat32 partitions for use for songs and movies...
never have tried to mount the ntfs part...wont until i am 100% sure...
hey,i think i just screwed up a hard disk,have to be careful....
do you think multiple attemps at installing affects the hdd..i tried thrice...
peace,
dhananjay

fdisk'ing a disk is dangerous only because humans are involved and they make mistakes. You can't fdisk something too many times and mess it up.

Although seperate partitions for /home can be good, it doesn't beat making regular backups. I have never had a seperate /home parition for my residential Linux installs (many years now). For simplicity's sake, you could just do:

/dev/hda1 Windows
/dev/hda2 /
/dev/hda3 Swap

But, that depends on what you are using it for.

As far as ntfs on linux, I wouldn't recommend using the write access that ships with the kernel. Somehow, Suse seems to have pretty good write access.

Ext3 vs. reiser is tough. I suspect reiser-variants will take over eventually, but ext3 is sufficient for now. You'll worry about upgrading your linux before you are really concerned that your filesystem is too old.