installing RH7.2 or 7.3 fails; RH7.1 & W2k work great

river · 05-23-2002, 06:23 PM

I have a 1.2 Ghz Athlon box that I have had RedHat 7.1, Windows 2000 pro and NT4 workstation install and be quite stable on a given box.

However, I can not install RedHat 7.2 nor 7.3 on the same box. I have tried using different installing options, installer CDs, boot floppies, upgrading from RH 71, and different harddrives and I always end up with the same problem.

EXT2-fs: unable to read superblock
cramfs: wrong magic
FAT: unable to read boot sector

After getting this error, I can turn around and install RH 7.1 or W2k pro without issue.

Any suggestions?

sewer_monkey · 05-24-2002, 12:35 PM

When you first installed RH 7.1, did you install it before or after Windoze? If before, Windoze could be the problem... Unfortunately I am not quite sure what to do... Just a suggestion that may (or may not) give you an idea.

river · 05-24-2002, 01:49 PM

I have installed M$ on this computer and hard drive before. However I have since fdisk /mbr and deleted all of the partitions using a WinMe and a 98se boot disk.

sewer_monkey · 05-24-2002, 04:00 PM

fdisk /mbr just cleans the Master Boot Record of any bootloaders (LILO or GRUB) that may have been installed there.

I was actually aiming at the fact that Windoze (2000 and XP) sometimes overwrites the MBR, hence messing up LILO/GRUB and not letting you load Linux.

river · 05-24-2002, 04:45 PM

I finally got the installer for RH 7.3 start. I used a 98se boot disk (w/CD drivers), then ran the script D:\dosutils\autoboot.bat and the installer launched and I installed RH 7.3 without issue.

Thanks for responding to my post sewer_monkey.