RedHat 7.x upgrade to Fedora. Help!

[Ken Latham]

Sort of a newbie (to Fedora anyway).  Please give what I say a little 
latitude, I can't get details on the messages because in graphical or 
text mode install I do not get enough time to read them...

I download, md5 checked and burned the 4 CD set.  FC3-i386-disk[1-4].iso
I put them through the mediacheck, just to be sure the burns were good 
and they passed.

I have no problems (text or graphical) until it starts install.
It write the install image to disk ok, but when it starts the recording 
(?) RPM transactions  (something like that).
I get a fatal error ... and I think it says ... "writing to linuxconf"  
but its really hard to catch.
It starts spewing what looks like successful mount messages for all the 
ext2 partitions it was supposed to convert to ext3.
Then it fails completely and tells me  I am safe to reboot.

Apparently the boot load did not get overwritten (even though I chose 
this) because when I boot I get RedHat 7 telling me the root partition 
is an unrecognized  format (I assume it is ext3).

My Linux (RH7) image is now kaput unless I do recovery which I'm hoping 
to avoid.  In this case, its root which is corrupted.  Given any other 
circumstances would be bad news,  but since I want to overwrite it with 
Fedora anyway ...

Should I choose new install and then carefully choose my partitions to 
wipe clean?

Ken