Fedora Users — Re: help for a newbie

Víctor Manuel Romero wrote:

Hi,

I,m istalling fedore c 2 on dell machina pentium 4 , Intel Borrad and the process fail . I don´t know why and the system simple freezes. It don´t show any message.

I think that the proble coulde be something related to the MBR because it stop when attempts format /boot file.

Cordial saludo

Víctor Manuel Romero LLanes

Ingeniero de Proyectos

Jefatura de Telecomunicaciones

USC-CEET

Tel: 2940100 ext.: 3707

If you prefer to write in Spanish, you could also reachme personally or through the fedora-es-list mailing list ;)

So no messages were shown, eh? And it just hangs there? I could give you advice on how to actually partition and format the disk yourself using the rescue CD and then using those partitions during the install process to install FC3 and avoid formatting the partitions (there's an option not to format the partitions).

You may want to print this:

1. Boot off the rescue cd or in CD 1 type at the boot prompt :linux rescue
2. Skip the network card part.
3. Follow the onscreen messages, it will not find any previous installation, so you may skip that part
4. Now you should be at a prompt. I hope you know how did the disk got partitioned... Your partitions should be there, just not the filesystems (i.e unformatted). So execute fdisk. For example fdisk /dev/hda, where hda is the master disk on the primary IDE channel on the computer, change accordingly.
5. To determine whether the partitions are indeed there, just type 'p' to show the partitions' table. If you see your partitions there and everything seems to be in order, just quit the program. If not, re-create the partitions. The partitions should be there since that part did not fail, only formatting. If the partitions are there and everything seems to be in order, just type 'q' to quit without re-writing the partition table, if you did changes, exit with 'w' to commit the changes.
6. Whether the partitions were there or you re-created them, you should be able to format them now. For instance suppose you partitioned your disk like this:
- hda1 - 100 Mb (for boot)
- hda2 - 30 Gb (for /)
-hda3 - 2 Gb (for swap)
You'd just have to format them like this:
mke2fs /dev/hda1 (to format boot with the ext2 filesystem, you can format it in ext3 too with mkfs.ext3 or mke2fs -J)
mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda2
and mkswap /dev/hda3 to format the swap partition. At this point you can reboot (type 'exit' at the prompt) and resume installation asking Disk Druid NOT to format the partitions, though it may try to format swap anyway. Install process at this point should go as expected.