RH7.2 and ext3

[Convert]

Hey there board. What is better to install RH7.2 on. ext2 or ext3? I am having trouble installing, and i think ext3 may be the culprate. When i install, i select for LILO to go on MBR, but it never does. I can't boot my linux! I am trying to dual boot win2k and rh7.2. I have done this with every version of Red Hat since 6.0. For some reason, i cannot install lilo on MBR. What is happening????

[fateswarm]

I don't think it would help but you can try. Ext3 is identical to Ext2 apart from the journaling part. It keeps more info for the changes that have been done on the disk so it can recover very very easily in the event of corrupt data. Apart from this it is adentical to ext2.

An the other hand I don't think that MBR will be written in ext3 if that was what you were thinking..

[bigrigdriver]

Options you might try:
1-Make a lilo boot floppy, installing lilo and a few files. Any time you want to boot into RH, insert the boot floppy before you powerup the box, and boot directly to RH.
2-My distro installs GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader), which can be set in install a small part of itself to the MBR (stage 1 of the boot process). Then the grub menu.lst file can be edited to show you all OS's on your machine, and give you the option of choosing which one to boot into, and which one will be the default OS.
Check your RH installation to see if you have grub, but is not installed. If it's there, install it (it will override lilo) and give it a try. If you don't have it, you should be able to download and install it from rpm. Read documentation on installing and configuring first, and print or make notes on what you need to do to set it up. www.gnu.org/software/grub (http://www.gnu.org/software/grub) is the place to get it if you want to check it out.

[Jomboni]

Man, if you use ext3, and you recompile your kernel make sure you enable ext3 support!. I figured that, since ext3 support was the big huge deal about RH 7.2, if I went to recompile it'd be enabled by default. Whoops! Recompiled my kernel, couldn't access anything on my hard drive! Fortunately I had the original one still, so it's all good.

[MkIII_Supra]

Save yourself the headache, use the ReiserFS! Far superior to either of the ext FS. Been using Reiser for 2 years now and I have tried others but none seem to perform and are reliable as ReiserFS.

[Convert]

RH7.2 supports ReiserFS??

[MkIII_Supra]

SuSE, Mandrake, Libranet all will set-up and support ReiserFS, as far as the others you have to configure, compile and pray to the Linux Diety to smile on your PC to install it and use it. One reason I never stayed with Red-Hat is the lack of a journaled file system, i.e. ReiserFS. I have tried the ext3 and another one from IBM on my SuSE and after some really horrible results I immediatly reverted back to ReiserFS. Once it's set up it's very reliable and it recovers very well from a hard boot.

You will have to read up on compiling and formating for ReiserFS with the other distros. SuSE 7.3, so far has been the best distro I have used to date, and that isn't saying much either. But I have ReiserFS and the system update is pretty farggin reliable so far. That and it's the only distro that I was able to install Nvidia drivers and actually get 3D to work without causing many lock-ups and X deaths! And it was as simple as using the Yast2 system online update utility!

For those that don't know I have been trying to get 3D to work on numberous Linux distros and iterations for the last 2 years.... and this is the first distro that succeded! Go figure.... :rolleyes:

[Strike]

Um, if you forget to enable ext3 support (but still have ext2 support), then you should be able to mount any ext3 drive as an ext2 drive.

Personally I prefer ext3 to Reiser, as it regularly outperforms Reiser with everything except for moving tons of small files. Plus, conversion in 2 minutes versus conversion in 2 hours is a HUGE win for me.