Trouble During the Installation

Do You Not See the Automatic Partitioning Screen?

If the Automatic Partitioning screen does not appear during your installation, you probably do not have enough free space in which to install Red Hat Linux.

If you do not want to partition manually, you should exit out of the installation (remove any diskettes and/or CD-ROMs from their respective drives and reboot your system). Then you can re-allocate space for your installation.

The best way to re-allocate space is to use the DOS-based fips utility. Review An Introduction to Disk Partitions in the Official Red Hat Linux Reference Guide for more information.

Partition Creation Problems

If you are having trouble creating a partition (for example, a root (/) partition, make sure you are setting its partition type to Linux Native.

Using Remaining Space

You have a swap and a / (root) partition created, and you have selected the root partition to use the remaining space, but it does not fill the hard drive.

If you hard drive is more than 1024 cylinders, you must create a /boot partition if you want the / (root) partition to use all of the remaining space on your hard drive.

Other Partitioning Problems

If you are using Disk Druid to create partitions, but cannot move to the next screen, you probably have not created all the partitions necessary for Disk Druid's dependencies to be satisfied.

You must have the following partitions as a bare minimum:

• A /boot partition of type Linux native

• A / (root) partition of type Linux native

• A <swap> partition of type Linux swap

	Tip
	When defining a partition's type as Linux swap, you do not have to assign it a mount point. Disk Druid automatically assigns the mount point for you.

	ALPHA Specific
	If you are using fdisk, be sure to use BSD-style disklabels and leave allocated space at the beginning of your hard drive. Refer to the section called SRM Partitioning Requirements in Chapter 4 for more information.

Are You Seeing Python Errors?

During some upgrades or installations of Red Hat Linux, the installation program (also known as Anaconda) may fail with a Python or traceback error. This error may occur after the selection of individual packages or while trying to save the upgrade log in /tmp. The error may look similar to:

Traceback (innermost last):
   File "/var/tmp/anaconda-7.1//usr/lib/anaconda/iw/progress_gui.py",
line 20, in run
     rc = self.todo.doInstall ()
   File "/var/tmp/anaconda-7.1//usr/lib/anaconda/todo.py", line 1468, in
doInstall
     self.fstab.savePartitions ()
   File "fstab.py", line 221, in savePartitions
     sys.exit(0)
 SystemExit: 0

 Local variables in innermost frame:
 self: <fstab.GuiFstab instance at 8446fe0>
 sys: <module 'sys' (built-in)>

 ToDo object:
 (itodo
 ToDo
 p1
 (dp2
 S'method'
 p3
 (iimage
 CdromInstallMethod
 p4
 (dp5
 S'progressWindow'
 p6

 <failed>

This error occurs in some systems where links to /tmp are symbolic to other locations or have been changed since creation. These symbolic or changed links are invalid during the installation process, so the installation program cannot write information and fails.

If you experience such an error, first try to download any available errata for Anaconda. Errata can be found at http://www.redhat.com/support/errata.

You can also search for bug reports related to this problem. To search Red Hat's bug tracking system, go to http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla.

Finally, if you are still facing problems related to this error, register your product and contact our support team. To register your product, go to http://www.redhat.com/apps/activate.