Re: Mystery Solved: Redhat 7.3 install stops

[Rick Stevens <rstevens vitalstream com>]

patrick_androsik bankone com wrote:
> First off thanks to everyone who provided me suggestions.
>
> On the CD size discussion.  The CD's I used were of the 650MB size and
> 700MB size.  Once I used the below fix both sets worked fine.
>
> The answer that has fixed my problem was to not use the EXT3 filesystem.
> For some reason still really unknown, the install did not like it when I
> choose to use the EXT3 filesystem.  I went ahead and installed Redhat
> several times on each system using the EXT2 filesystem and no problems what
> so ever.  I then decided to temp fate and I turned around and repeated the
> process again and choose to use the EXT3 filesystem and guess what.  The
> install failed to complete everytime.  So I turned around again (getting
> dizzy at this point) and repeated the process and used EXT2 and low and
> behold the install completed. So something must be wacked out in the
> install for 7.3.

No, it poops out on some systems under 7.2, also.  There is some form
of race condition between the install kernel and the ext3 modules.  I've
seen it on Tyan, Intel and ASUS motherboards, some older Compaq servers
and several other systems.  The install kernel is a lowest-common-
denominator beast so it's bootable on the maximum number of systems.
They've made some compromises in it that apparently exacerbate this
race condition and has been known to muck with MCE and DMA on some
motherboards, too.

Once your system is installed and the REAL kernel is run, the ext3
filesystem will work fine.  You can convert ext2 to ext3 filesystems
by using the tune2fs -J option.
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- Rick Stevens, SSE, VitalStream, Inc.      rstevens vitalstream com -
- 949-743-2010 (Voice)                    http://www.vitalstream.com -
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-     Better to understand a little than to misunderstand a lot.     -
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