i installed redhat 9 on my comptuer with the automatically configured partition wizard in the red hat 9 install. no other operating system is on the hard drive. once the red hat 9 install is completed i rebooted my computer, but it gives me an error: "error loading operating system" or something to that effect. is this caused by my partitions or did i just do something incorrect.

windows xp was on this hard drive previously, but i let the red hat 9 installer delete the partitions and reformat new partitions for linux supposedly... is my error caused by the partitions or something else i did? should i just use fdisk and reinstall redhat?

please help.

You most likely selected to install the bootloader on the partition instead of the MBR.
If you only have one OS (in this case Linux), you need to install a bootloader (GRUB or Lilo) in the MBR.

Use your Linux boot disk in order to boot the system, login as root and type:

ok, i will do that... i thought that i made sure of that... but i will do what you said... i will let you know how that works...

i really appreciate the help... i thought maybe i did the partitions wrong or something

hey, that worked!!!

that is excellent, thank you so much...

now my next question is what do i type at the grub command line...

i pressed the tab key for possible commands and it says things like kernel, boot, etc...

i just dont know what i am supposed to type into to startup linux...i would like to get into the gui part of the linux

i think i figured out what to do with grub, but i get an error...


i typed kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1

and then boot from the grub command line...

but once i do that i get a kernel panic...

this is my error: EXT2-fs: ide0(3,1): couldn't mount because of uncupported optional features (4).
kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:01


edit:

i found a thread on here that said make sure you have plug and play in the bios turned off and something about memory is not enough... i have 256 memory, so i think i have enough...

i check my plug and play and it is disabled...

any ideas how to fix this error, so i can get my linux working?

Use your boot disk to boot the system.

Take a look in the /boot/grub directory, what are the files ?
Is there a file called grub.conf ? If not, check the /etc directory. (It may look like grub.conf.anaconda)