I am running a Dell Inspiron 530 Desktop, dual-booting Vista Home Premium with Fedora 10. When I try to install Fedora 11, the installer collects all the information and apparently sets up correctly. When I push Enter to start the Installation, I get an error message 'Error mounting /dev/sdb2, no medium.'
Has any one seen this error?
Cheers. Ray

have you formatted the /dev/sdb2 to ex3 or ext4???

I can't even find oput what sdb2 is. The question does not not occur when installing Fedora 10.
Cheers. Ray

The 'no medium' part of the error is often seen when trying to use a CD/DVD drive with no disk in the drive. sdb2 is referring to the second partition on the second hard drive. How many drive do you have and how many partitions on each and what are they used for? If you can use the Fedora CD and from a terminal enter the command: fdisk -l (Lower case Letter L, do it as root, post it here) to obtain partition/drive information. Have you checked to see if the drive you are trying to install Fedora to is attached (if an external drive) or the cables are secure if internal?

I have 1 Hard drive with 4 partitions:3 for Windows Vista and 1 40 Gig partition in which I install Linux. I have 1 optical drive in which I run the installation Disk.
Cheers. Ray

that 1 linux partition is not enough , unless you ARE putting grub on the MBR
For Fedora 11 the /boot ( or MBR) MUST be ext3 and / is ext4 or LVM


from the install dvd -- run it in rescue mode and after you run " chroot /mnt/sysimage "
run " fdisk -l "
and post the output.

once when you start your installation there should be a stage where you are prompted with the partition tool !! it will give you various options like -use entire disk,-use free space,-custom ..
click on it .. it will show you all the available partitions on your harddisk .. now for any Linux OS installation you need two types of partition primarily 1.a partition in linux native format (EXT,ReiserFS..etc) 2. a swap partition (used for virtual paging ) !! so you need to create these partitions !! so you need to delete the partition(i am assuming all the partitions are in ntfs/fat ) in which you want to install your fedora using the graphical partition application that it shows!! then create a new partition in .EXT3/.EXT4 format !! and then create a 1GB partition for swap !! set the mount point of the .EXT3 to /
and then continue installation .. i am sure it will work !! sorry if i am not very clear on the above .. let me know if you have any doubts on the above ^^

I am posting this from Fedora 10. I show 3 partitions for Windows, an extended partition sda4, and a swap partition(sda5) and an LVM partition(sda6). When I want to install a new version of Linux, I delete the partitions for Linux with Disk Manager in Windows, leaving me with 40 gig free space. When I install Linux I tell it to use the "Largest Continuous Free Space". All the installers use that space and create their partition set-up in it, except Fedora 11, which shows the exception noted above.
Cheers. Ray

I haven't installed Fedora for three years but, from what I read about it, its default is to have a separate ext3 filesystem for a separate /boot partition and using ext4 filesystem for the root partition as JohnVV indicated above. I'd suggest creating a separate, small partition as a boot partition.

This the print out Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x08000000

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 6 48163+ 6 FAT16
/dev/sda2 7 1312 10485760 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 * 1312 56885 446393216 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda4 56886 60801 31455270 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 56886 60634 30113811 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 60635 60801 1341396 82 Linux swap / Solaris
I am running Ubuntu 9.04, since Fedora looks like a dead end for me.
Cheers. Ray