installing RedHat 4
 

I am installing RedHat 4 Upgrade 5 on a virtual machine on my VMware Infrastructure Client 3.5. When it prompts me to switch to disk 2, I do so and it gives me this message:

An error occurred trying to initialize swap on device VolGroup00/LogVol01. This problem is serious, and the install cannot continue.

Press<Enter> to reboot your system.

Can anyone please help me!?!?

At this point in the install, hit Ctrl + Alt + F2 (i think) and you'll see one of the consoles running the commands in line with the installer (also check F1 to F6) One should list the commands being run and the real outputs of the commands which are being interpreted back to you. sounds like it'd be using mkswap which is failing. Have you tried installing without LVM on this system? I assume you are actually just letting it use the system defaults here, but naturally there's no "reason" something like this should be allowed to fail. you may well find if you do partition your own system you should be OK. Within a VM there may be issues with disk allocation... Your disk images are all fully allocated on creation aren't they? not expanding on demand on the real underlying disk?

Linux is so difficult to understand. I would never have been able to figure this kind of thing:

"install, hit Ctrl + Alt + F2 (i think)"

Why can't the installation window tell you about these kinds of commands?

Your reply is not helping the OP. While I'm sure you mean no harm with this, if you want to post abstracts of your mental processes, please feel free to use your LQ blog or post in /General. Thanks for understanding.