ES3 won't boot with LVM nearby

[David Morgan]

Anybody heard of a dual-boot conflict like this, between Fedora3 using 
LVM, and Enterprise Linux ES3?

During inital bootup following installation of ES3 there's a "can't 
mount" problem. The disk was already half-occupied by a copy of Fedora3 
that uses Logical Volume Management. The problem doesn't happen if ES3 
is installed as the only OS on the drive. Also no problem when the 
existing OS is Fedora 2 not using LVM. I'm suspecting it's about LVM 
being there, probably ES3 doesn't like it.

Details below. Ever heard of anything like that?
--------------

Problem detail: boot attempt ends in kernel panic, it can't find 
/sbin/init. That's traceable to previous failure to have mounted the 
partition holding /sbin/init. A little earlier in the screen messages is 
something very close to:

EXT3-fs error (device ide(3,2)): ext3_check_cescriptors: Block bitmap 
for group 0 not in group
group descriptors corrupted

and it doesn't mount. Using EXT2 instead gave similar behavior, slightly 
different message (about use of unsupported filesystem options). If you 
boot an independent copy of linux you can mount the problem partition 
and see all the stuff installed by ES3. No obvious problem. If you run 
fsck on the partition, it says it's clean but if you force it to check 
(fsck -f) it does, and finds something group descriptor related and 
leaves a message that the file system was modified. But when you 
re-attempt to boot ES3 in this partition, it still fails just the same.


Disk partitioning detail:
Fedora 3's partitions - sits in 2 partitions, a linux partition 
/dev/hda1 where /boot is mounted, and an LVM partition /dev/hda2. The 
LVM partition holds 2 logical volumes, a smaller one formatted and used 
for swap and a larger one where / is mounted.
ES3's partitions - a large /dev/hda3 to mount / and hold the whole 
filesystem, and a small /dev/hda4 for swap.