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Having worked on S390 mainframes, SMP NT servers and now most recently SUN solaris I decied to try out red hat v5.0 on my home PC. Bad idea. I make up the install and supp iamge disks no problem. I decided to blow away my FAT32 10.2 gig partition and make a new one at 80%, with 127 meg UNIX swap as my system has 128 meh ram and the left as a / root mount point. I read all relevant docos before starting that came with your Red Hat CD. I find that disk druid wont do FAT32 partitions. I exit and do a dos floppy boot to make the 80% primary fat32 partition. I rerun the red hat install. For some undocumented reason I find that I cannot allocate all the available space to the root mount. It was around 1.5 gig free and disk druid would only do a fraction even with the growable flag. I decide not to worry about this and just go with it. I am then greeted with a message saying that I dont have a unix swap partition defined when I did have a 127 meg unix swap defined in disk druid with the correct type as unix swap. I exited from the install and decided to go back to the dos floppy boot to put in a few simple fat16 partition thinking that disk druid wasnt happy with the fat32. I find that fdisk thinks I have extended partitions with logical drives. I cant delete the extended partition because fdisk says that a logical drive exists. I try to delete a logical drive in the extended partition but fdisk no says there isnt one!!! I reboot the unix install procedure and disk druid can no longer read the media. The fdisk option inside the red hat install doesnt do anything and when selecting the edit option the screen flashes and I go nowhere. I then spend two hours online on a real computer running windows to discover some undocumented fdisk commands that forces fdisk to create a logical drive in the extended partition, and then just deleted it to undo what disk druid did to my partition table. Feeling impressed that I fixed this, I retry the red hat UNIX install for the Nth time. I had a fat16 primary partition and used disk druid to create a root mount and a unix swap partition. Again I was greeted with a message saying I handt allocated swap disk space when I had. This time I ignored it and went ahead. The system went into fomratting the drive. After a long wait it said that it couldnt mount the drive!! Then when I tried to reboot a dos floppy the dos version fdisk had the old problem of extended logical drives defined but not existing!! Fixing this using the dos fdisk force command I retried the Linux install using disk druid. Same error, cant mount. After spending hours on this lame product I gave up and reinstalled windows 98, which actually works. God help those who have basic windows knowlede, because with my expert level NT knowledge and reading your docos I wasnt able to get it installed, Disk druid, fdisk and your install routines are full of bugs. If you expect people to migrate from windows youve got to make it a hell of alot easier. The reason I tried your product was I wanted to see what the hype is all about, but so far I havent seen anything of value.
Sorry for the difficulties that you had. Most if not all of the problems that you have mentioned have been addressed in our latest version 5.2 and now 6.0 which will be released in about a week. I feel you will have much better luck with these newer improved releases than with the older 5.0. The newer versions can be purchased from us or from www.lsl.com, www.linuxmall.com, or downloaded from ftp.redhat.com.