Craig White wrote: > On Fri, 2005-09-09 at 22:58 -0400, Edward Diener wrote: > >>I burned a DVD for CentOS 4.1. I booted from it and everything went fine for the >>graphical screen installation. I choose separate partitions for my /boot (hde6), >>/ (hde9), and swap (hde12) areas. My /boot partition was ext2 and my / partition >>was ext3. I installed grub in my /boot partition successfully. I have a Boot >>Loader, System Commander 8.13 which controls the MBR. The installation then >>nicely ejected my DVD disk, told me to remove any other installation media, and >>rebooted my machine. It rebooted into System Commander, I chose the CentOS boot >>partition, and this rebooted me to CentOS without a problem. >> >>CentOS now finished its installation steps, among which was setting up a user >>account, and attempted to bring up the login screen. My screen went dark, the >>icon went to a waiting/turning icon for a long time, and I said to myself uh-oh. >>Finally with most of the screen still dark a small message box appeared with an >>OK button which said: >> >>"Can not start the greeter program, you will not be able to log in. This display >>will be disabled. Try logging in by other means and editing the configuration file." >> >>I pressed OK, my screen went into text mode, and repeated lines of: >> >>ext3-fs error >>(device hde9) in start transaction, Journal has aborted. >> >>continued to fill the screen. >> >>The only way to proceed was to hit the restart button of my computer. >> >>My thoughts of possible reasons for the failure are these. My hard drive is off >>of an HPT 374 Raid controller, without Raid being actually used on it, and is a >>160 GB hard drive, 147 GB formatted. The /boot (hde6) partition starts at >>approximately the 56 GB boundary, the / (hde9) partition starts at approximately >>the 76 GB, and the swap drive starts at approximately the 106 GB boundary. >> >>Is it possible that I needed to turn on LBA32 as an install option, since there >>was a screen where I could have checked it but did not ? Is it possible that I >>needed to tell the install, when choosing my partitions for /boot,/, and swap >>that this was a Raid controller, event though I am not using Raid with it, since >>I noticed a Raid button on the Disk Druid graphical screen but used Edit instead >>to set up my partitions ? Is it possible that CentOS either does not support my >>Raid controller or supports it in some earlier release which does not work >>properly even when not using Raid, so that I need to install the proper release >>of it somehow during the installation process ? >> >>I am groping for answers but am really hoping that someone has some knowledge of >>this problem so that I can use CentOS. Everything went well until the final >>disaster, and I was keen on getting CentOS to install on my computer. I had >>previously tried FC4 previously but that wouldn't even get past my graphical >>screen, failing because I have a Matrox P650 video adapter, but CentOS handled >>it with aplomb. I am a relatively Linux newbie although an experienced software >>developer and computer user, so if someone could help me get CentOS running it >>would really be appreciated. Thank you ! > > ---- > sounds like you handled things right But obviously CentOS did not. Why ? > but I'm confused as to what > comprises things like /dev/hde1, hde2, hde3, hde4, hde5 etc. I have 3 non-Linux primary partitions and then an extended partition where all my Linux logical partitions exist. My linux partitions in the extended partition consist of 3 100MB boot partitions for various Linux distros, of which I attempted to use the second of the 3 for CentOS, followed by 3 20 GB root partitions for those Linux distros, the second of the 3 used for CentOS, followed by a 10 GB common Linux partition to share files between the distros, followed by my common swap drive. > > is it possible for you to boot CD #1 again and type 'linux rescue' (no > quotes) at the boot prompt to enter rescue mode. > > When it completes booting, it would be interesting to find out... > > fdisk -l /dev/hde > > (this will list the partitions) > > you could try repairing the partitions... > > e2fsck -fy /dev/hde6 > e2fsck -fy /dev/hde9 CentOS formatted these when I installed. Why would they need repair ? > > Is this a dual-boot with Windows? If so, did Windows think any part of > hde to be part of a RAID array? Again, as explained in my OP, I have no RAID array but just the HPT 374 onboard RAID controller handling my hard drives. This is because my normal IDE contrller has other non-harddisk devices attached to it.