filesystem creation failed

["Patty O'Reilly" <pattyo nt4dt com>]

Hi,

Last night during an re-install of 24 classroom machines with RH 9.0, 
all 24 machines reported the same error duing the filesystem creation 
stage of the install.

Students in the class re-installed the machines using a network FTP 
install. They deleted all the previously created Linux partitions on the 
disk with Disk Druid, then created new partitions, and proceeded with 
the interactive install. After the package selection, duing filesystem 
creation, this was the error found on all the error log screens:

Writing inode tables: 0/38
Could not write 8 blocks in inode table starting at 6: Attempt to write 
block on filesytem resulted in short write

Somehow I think it is related to the fact that we deleted the linux 
partitions first then recreated them. However, I have done this before 
with other versions of RedHat duing an install without problem.

Has anyone seen this before? Any idea why it happened and how to avoid 
it in the future?

--patty