Hello,

I came across your web page earlier this evening when I was looking for 
information about installing reiserfs on the root partition of my laptop 
during a fresh installation of RedHat 7.2.  Your website states that it is 
not possible to install a fresh reiserfs partition / filesystem using RedHat 
7.2.  This is incorrect.  It is actually possible (and quite easy) to do this 
using just the stock RedHat CDROMs.

What follows is the procedure for how I did it.  Feel free to post it on your 
site if you like or link to the (forthcoming) page on my site:
http://www.cencula.com/reiserfs.html

Regards,
Mike Cencula


# note: I did this with the "text" setup option...

# go through the setup until you get to the part about partitioning
# your disk called "Disk Partitioning Setup"

# hit alt-F2 to switch to a console

# make a device special node for your hard drive
/usr/bin/mknod /dev/hda b 3 0

# manually run fdisk and create your partitions
/usr/sbin/fdisk /dev/hda

# save your partition changes, write table to disk and exit
# don't forget to set the partition types.  These will
# probably be 83 (Linux) and 82 (Linux swap)

# make the block special devices for the partitions you want reiserfs on
/usr/bin/mknod /dev/hda1 b 3 1
/usr/bin/mknod /dev/hda2 b 3 2
/usr/bin/mknod /dev/hda3 b 3 3
...

# note that if you're going to use lilo, you should have a separate
# non-reiserfs partition to store your kernel images on.  I created a 64MB
# ext2 partition that will be mounted as /boot.  This is because the version
# of lilo that ships with RedHat 7.2 does not understand reiserfs.  Therefore,
# it needs to be a filesystem that lilo does understand...like ext2.  I don't
# use grub, so I can't say whether it would work with kernel images stored on
# reiserfs.

# now put reiserfs on the partitions you want.
/usr/bin/mkreiserfs /dev/hda3
...
...

# hit alt-F1 and switch back to the installation program.
# you should still be on the "Disk Partitioning Setup" screen.
# select the fdisk option and hit q in fdisk to exit.  that
# will get you past the "Disk Partitioning Setup" screen.

# when you get to the part about formatting your partitions, don't
# choose to format the reiserfs partitions.  (after all...you
# just did that!)  it's ok to format any ext2 filesystems as
# long as you don't need the data on those anymore.

# continue with your installation!!!

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