*NOTE* I didn't write this as a bug report, but it may be a bug. I have included a lot of information here that may seem extraneous. I would like to share with you my recent experience installing RedHat 7.0 Deluxe. I hope that you will take this seriously and that you will respond. I should first start off by saying that I have been using un*x systems for 6 years now and much of that time has been as a system administrator. I have installed pretty much every linux distribution there is (mainly to see how the installation process works in the different distros) over the past several years. I started my journey into linux with a 68K mac running a beta version if mklinux. I do not consider myself in anyway to be a newbie to linux. I would love to get rid of my windows machine altogether (though I would like that to be my choice, a little forshadowing...) and use only unix based systems. I am a professional programmer and unix system administrator, but this system I was installed was for personal use. Now that we have that out of the way, I will get into the problems I had with RedHat 7.0. Aside from the obvious problems like backwards binary compatibility, the problems I had were with the installation. I also have had some problems running kde programs (like kpackage) that gave me library function mismatches and suggested relinking the libraries.... My system is a Pentium III 600mhz emachine with 128megs of ram a riva tnt2 AGP video card with 8 megs of ram and pci, isa and usb ports. I have two 15gig maxtor drives set up in a master/slave config. There is also a CD-RW, DVD and floppy drives. The master drive (hda) has 1 dos partition and has windows on it. The other drive has linux on it with currently 2 partitions, / and swap. Install try #1... The install was a custom where I chose all packages. It installed just fine. I used lilo on the mbr and on reboot got an L. I tried using a boot floppy, but that resulted in a kernel panic. I don't really know why this would happen. It is the same configuration that the 6.2 was using, but I wanted to do a clean install, so I did not choose the upgrade path. It did format the drive and required both binary cds to install. It appeared that everything had installed, so I am not sure why the kernel wouldn't boot under lilo or the boot diskette. Install try #2... This was not the first time an install didn't work on reboot on a machine I had... so I decided to just try again. This time I decided that I wanted to see how RedHat would partition things, so I choose the Server install (I think) and choose to autopartition. I started the install and went to do something else (like I had with all other installs). I don't recall if I was asked for the second cd, but when the install was done, I rebooted the machine. It booted just fine (thought the graphical lilo chooser thing is annoying). When the machine came up I did a df -k and was absolutely HORRIFIED to see that the linux partitions where on both disks. I got a very sick feeling and knew that I was screwed. I have two computers; one laptop running windows and one desktop running both windows and linux. I had a couple weeks earlier reinstalled windows on the laptop (it was crashing a lot) and had moved all my backup files onto the desktop. I had not yet synced the two computers. I also had no external media backups of my windows machines. So... everything was lost. I am very angry that I was stupid enough let your program auto partition. I am very angry that I was stupid enough to not have backups, I should know better and would never let a commercial system go without backups. I am just very angry. I cannot believe that the dos partition would be deleted and formatted over. Your documentation says nothing about that. Your documentation (the install booklet that came in the box) says that linux partitions will be overwritten and that empty disk space will be partitioned. WHY would my dos partition be removed??? Now, I have also installed commercial unix systems like Solaris and they have auto partitioning features, but all it does is set up suggested partitions in the gui disk editor and the live person must then agree to the proposed partitioning. Why doesn't your install program do that? I feel very foolish for trusting your installation product!!! And for paying $75 bucks to erase my data. How do you respond?
Install Try #1: It isn't clear to me what you are saying, so let me see if I understand. You did a custom install, specified that LILO should be written to the MBR and also you created a new boot floppy when asked? Install Try #2: There is already a request for enhancement for the issue you have brought up, bug number 17085.
Install try #1: Yes, I did lilo to mbr and made boot disk at the end of the graphical installation. On reboot I got (without the boot floppy) just an L out of lilo. When I tried the boot floppy it started to boot up and then got a kernel panic. I didn't save the information and frankly I don't really care about try #1. It is what happened in install #2 that pissed me off. I only included the info on the first try to illustrate what I was doing. RH7 is running just fine on the machine now (though taking up both disks) as was RH6.2. It was the partitioning over and formating my primary drive that is the problem. Thanks being such a drone in your response to the real issue.
BTW: I get the following results when I try to view bug 17085 that you referred to: Permission denied. Sorry; you do not have the permissions necessary to see bug 17085.
Sorry my fault the bug should be viewable now.
Ok based on your feedback I am going to mark this as a dupe of bug 17085. Thank you for giving us your comments. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 17085 ***