During one of my recent missions I had the opportunity to install Red Hat 6.1 on a ESX Virtual Machine. In the installation process, I got a strange message: “unable to read group information from repositories”. If you have also encountered such a problem this posting may help you.

While trying to install the RHEL 6.1 iso on an ESX Virtual Machine, the installation complains and displays the following pop-up after having formatted the hard drive:

“Unable to read group information from repositories”

The only choices are [Exit Installer] and [Retry], so there is no way to go back and try different settings or even getting an error log without resetting and starting all over… which didn’t solve the problem anyway. In fact in my case the problem was coming from the VM CD-ROM option. Indeed the virtual CD-ROM was set in mode “Emulate IDE”. Changing this mode from “Emulate IDE” to “Passthrough”(recommended) solve the problem.

CD Rom parameters for Red Hat installatio

Looking over the internet, several people have encountered this error. However, some of them are not running their Red Hat on a Virtual Machine. If you are one of them, please have a look on the following bug report on Red Hat: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=687956

Hope this helps!