Hello,

I bought 20 gb of hard disk serveral days ago, and attempted to install both win98 and Red hat 7.1, but finally, decided upon server-class install, and decided to forget win 98.

It installed perfectly. When I booted and saw my regular desktop in the KDE (gui), everything was still fine.

But in the middle of something [changing right-handed mouse to left-handed], Linux HUNG.
For a long time. So I restarted the pc, in the normal Windows way.

That's when the error started: it could not boot /, ["INODE error ..."]

and said "run fsck manually. You are being dropped to a shell ...."

in the shell, I mounted the drive that is /, and then ran fsck on it. I said YES to all the FIXIT prompts, and when I rebooted with the reboot command, it gave a more serious error.

I messed things up further. Tired, I attempted to run the RH installer again, and choose to Automatic partition and to REMOVE all data.
But the installer stopped at the package installation screen, saying '/boot has a serious error....the installation cannot continue. press enter to reboot'

The final and most serious error is that I went to fdisk [via my win 98 start up disk] and deleted the boot partition. leaving the extended. and create a new one of 10 gb [when the extended dos partiion of 19 gb already existed, out my TOTAL 20 gb !!!]

Now I have deleted the extra dos partion i create and am left with the 19 gb ext dos partition. I cant delete it because it 'contains logical drives' [but as far as I can see it, 'no logical drives exist']

HELP !!!!!!!!

I'm not rich enough to buy a new har disk

Rgds,

A.A.

Uhm... fsck should have warned you not to work on a mounted partition, you should have booted from a boot disk that didn't use any of you partitions, then run fsck from there. However I don't see how this cause you all the errors you are getting.

If I were you I'd try using the Linux version of fdisk to remove the partitions (or DiskDruid) then reboot and start the install again. If this is a new harddisk then it'll still have the manufacturer's guarantee on it, hence you should be able to get it changed if it is faulty.

cheers

Jamie...

Thank you.

I tried just that after laboring through REDHAT manuals. And the reinstall worked.

(And I never knew GNOME was that beautiful !!!!!)

Cheers to you,

Ahsan A.