RH50 can't find inittab

[brat rotfl com]

Hello
I've got RH 5.0.  Had it all installed and configured pretty well and
learned most of the basics.  Decided to reinstall to get rid of all my
undocumented changes and experiments.  Removed all partitions and booted
up the CD.  Did my install, installed 'everything' which is the same
thing I did before.  Install went smoothly, no problems.  Removed disks,
rebooted, RH gets almost all the way booted up when it stops and says

Unable to locate inittab.
Enter run level:

I did.  Multiple times.  No matter what runlevel I try RH responds with
(actually I only tried 3 and 5)

No more processes left in this runlevel. 

And then it locks up.  Won't respond to anything, except for pressing
ENTER makes it repeat the message.

I've got the bootable rescue disks that install required me to make, but
have no idea what to do with them.  I tried to use some of the command's
I'm familiar with to try and locate, or edit, inittab - no luck.  All I
can do is  'cd'  and  'ls' .  Already tried to wipe it all out and
reinstall again, with the exact same results.  I'm absolutely clueless
what to do now.  Does anyone have any suggestions?  (I can enter single
user mode at LILO but again, I don't know how to fix the problem if I do
that.)

Thanks in advance -
Bill