Trouble installing Fedora 6 on 64-bit Acer

ssalvador · #1 12th December 2006, 08:36 PM

I have just recently purchased an Acer Aspire E380 Desktop with AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ 2.2GHZ CPU. I have 2x250GB SATA hard disks, Windows XP on drive 1 and attempting to install linux Fedora Core 6 on 2nd drive. Boot loader was installed on MBR of 1st drive. On reboot, I select 2nd drive to load linux, but get "Error loading operating system".

I have selected mostly defaults during install of x86_64. Also tried installing 32-bit Fedora Core 6 but to no avail. I still get the same error message.

Can anyone help?

Thanks

Brian1 · #2 12th December 2006, 11:03 PM

Lets see a few config files. Boot up with the first CD with the command ' linux rescue '
Let it mount the exist fc6 install.
Once up in a terminal screen use the command ' cd /mnt/sysimage/etc '
Now use the command to see the contents of a file. ' cat fstab '. Post contents. Same for ' cat mtab '
Now use the command ' cd /mnt/sysimage/boot/grub '
Now ' cat grub.conf '

What I am wondering is maybe the drive was installed as an IDE type device and now the new boot may see the drive as a Sata using a different device identifier. An IDE is seen as /dev/hd** and most sata's would be seen as /dev/sd**.

Brian

ssalvador · #3 13th December 2006, 09:08 PM

Hi Brian,

Attached are the files(mtab.txt, fstab.txt, and grub.conf.txt)

Brian1 · #4 13th December 2006, 10:23 PM

Looking into the mtab file it shows the /boot to be /dev/sdb1. Is this correct for the clot to be /dev/sdb*?
The rest is LVM and not sure how to see if it is using the correct device block. Not a user of LVM do to some issues I see in it. So if one can confirm the Physical volume of the LVM is in /dev/sdb* then I see no reason for it not to work. You might be better off using a real partition type like ext3 for the / of the drive. So one would have 3 partitions. One for /, one for /boot, and one for a small swap. That is about all I know to try.

Brian

mail279741 · #5 13th December 2006, 11:42 PM

you might want to seriously consider installing FC5 instead of FC6.

FC6 is unstable and has a serious # of problems.

ssalvador · #6 14th December 2006, 03:04 PM

Thank you all. I will download fC5 and see if it works better.

ssalvador · #7 15th December 2006, 04:38 PM

No success either with FC5!! Installation hung computer during text mode boot phase before the GUI section. Exasperated and about to give up on Fedora. How is Redhat doing... Hmmm!

Brian1 · #8 16th December 2006, 03:55 PM

Redhat would more than likely be the same since fedora is based on the redhat distro.
Did you use ext3 partition instead of LVM. Create the partitions yourself during the install.

Brian

ppesci · #9 17th December 2006, 04:47 PM

Can you give some space in your first drive to put Fedora /boot partition?

May be your computer can't start from disk 2. I had same problem years ago. You can try to change the size of windows partition with parted or make a backup for your information and let Anaconda use some space from disk 1.

HTH

Pietro Pesci Feltri

joe.pelayo · #10 17th December 2006, 05:07 PM

First an advice: use the reiser file system to install FC, it is easier to repair than ext3 when something goes wrong.
In order to do so yo have to type "linux reiserfs" (without the hyphens) in the prompt you get when you boot from the DVD.

I did not understand the problem you have with FC6. Did you install it or did it hang during the install process?

Furthermore, assuming that you could install FC6, when you boot, do you see the grub screen (a blue one)?

Recently I experienced a rather odd problem with my FC6 installations because I temporarily removed the drive from the PC (I needed to test something with another Linux distro and preferred to do so with a different hard drive) and when I reinstalled it I found that my FC6 could not boot. What the hell? I asked because I did nothing to the hard drive but a little research in the BIOS showed me that something was missconfigured and the computer tried to boot from the other hard drive (I also have two, but IDE, and the other is not bootable). So I suggest you to take a see in your BIOS because perhaps your problem is simplier than it seems to be.

Good luck. I wonder how fast would FC6 run in such a machine, congratulations!

ssalvador · #11 18th December 2006, 06:11 PM

Fedora Core 6 issues have now become a moot point as I have learned that the Intel Fortran Compiler for linux officially supports Fedora Core 4. I will download fedora 4 and see what happens.

Thanks for now...

ppesci · #12 18th December 2006, 06:38 PM

I think you will have some troubles with FC 4 and the SATA drives.

Pietro Pesci Feltri