OK, I have installed Fedora 7 about 5 times so far and each time it fails to boot after a "successful" install.
I have (now) 3 hard drives as follows:
IDE Seagate 120 GB [90 GB: NTFS (Windows XP OS) 30 GB: Fedora 7 (in theory)]
IDE Maxtor 40 GB [Fully dedicated to spare storage; NTFS]
(new today) SATA Seagate 320 GB [Fully dedicated to spare storage; NTFS]

is the error I receive when I attempt to boot Fedora 7
However, when I try to use the rescue mode (I found instructions on how to rebuild the initrd) on the DVD, Anaconda complains that there is no Fedora Installation.

I am considering moving the data I have on the Maxtor IDE to the Seagate SATA and trying an install on that one after repartitioning the Primary hard drive to be only NTFS, but I don't want to go through all that if I can help it.

The last time I used anaconda was with RH8. But I am guessing that after rescue mode saying it can't find the Fedora installation that it dumps you into a command prompt. If so, take a look at what partitions it sees by typing

I would think your Fedora partition should be /dev/hda2 or /dev/hda5 (possibly /dev/sda2 or /dev/sda5 since sometime IDEs appear to be getting emulated as SCSI these days). If fdisk shows the partition, try manually mounting it and taking a look around:

and any other ls command for you to convince yourself what is there.

fdisk found all my hard drives and it turns out that the SATA turned up as sda pushing my IDEs up to sdb and sdc
I tried to mount sdb3 (the LVM with Fedora) and the result was:
I decided I am going to try to install it onto my 40GB hard drive and give the 25GB back to Windows. But that will have to wait until I get back from vacation in a week.

I wonder if the mounting error has something to do with it being a LVM. Sadly, I know nothing about those yet.

Good luck!

I've tried both LVM and ext3. Neither have worked and it is beginning to get frustrating, but I have other things to entertain me for the time being.
I will eventually do an install on a dedicated HD (40GB Maxtor) but not until I catch up with my other stuff since I was on vacation all week.

I just want you to know that you are not alone. I have had the same issue. I have a thread started on Fedora forums, but still no solution yet. When I boot after a "successful" install I get dropped to a "grub command prompt" and that is the end. Fedora 7 is the onlyd thing on this drive and grub is installed to the MBR.

I thought it was because of LVM (which is the Fedora 7 default), but the fix in the bug report did not work. So I deleted the default partition scheme and did my own, with just dev/sda1 as "/" and dev/sda2 as "swap". Fdisk -l is seeing my IDE drive as a SCSI so the sda is right. However, after installing 4 times and the same result every time being dropped to a grub prompt, I'm going to just install another distro. I have never had this issue before, but this is the first time I have tried Fedora.

I have installed Debian, Ubuntu, Mepis, NetBSD, and Slackware without issue, but this one has me stumped. Some of the fixes that I found seemed to make sense, but did not work for me at all.

If I get an answer, I will post it here to this thread as well, in the hopes that it helps you.

Very frustrating for a distro that is supposed to be so easy to install and use. But nothing is perfect. Hopefully the Fedora community can help you and I sort it out.

mowestusa

Well, here is my update, but I'm afraid it is of little help.

After failing with four Fedora installs, and each one dropping me at the "grub prompt", I decided to install Ubuntu and see what happened. Well, after a "sucessful" install I got the "grub prompt" on reboot. Well, I thought this was strange, so I decided that maybe this was a hardware issue.

It turns out that I only had two drives on the system. An IDE DVD-ROM drive and an IDE Hard Drive 60gigs. I had the DVD-ROM drive set to "master" and the Hard Drive set to "slave", with both on the same ribbon cable and using the "primary" channel on the motherboard. After trying lots of different combinations (this is a Frankenputer, which most of my machines that run linux are), I discovered what worked. I simply had to have the DVD-ROM set to "slave" and the Hard Drive set to "master" on the primary IDE channel, and the Fedora install worked this time like a charm.

I'm doubting that this is your issue, but maybe it is hardware related, and not a Fedora problem. I had tried lots of other options before this worked. If this doesn't help with your issue, at least you know one hardware configuration you never want to try on your own Frankenputer. Take care!

The way my system is set up, the HD are on their own IDE Channel and the Optical Disc Drives are on a different channel. It may be a problem of the HD being on the secondary channel (I thought I had it set up right when I built the thing but I must have made a mistake), but I am afraid that if I swap the connections Windows will freak out, as it is accustomed to.
I am wondering that this may be a problem with support for the mainboard I have (Nforce4 SLI) but it could be hardware related. Some time I will swap the IDE cables to test the theory.

EDIT: as a minor note, HD should not be slaves to optical discs drives (CD/DVD). Especially when the HD is the only one or the one which boots.

Yes, I found that out the hard way, after 5 Linux installs. I didn't know that would matter, since my boot order is DVD, floppy, HD. That was the issue why my installs failed to work.

I'm still not sure why I couldn't get the HD recognized by the BIOS when I plugged the DVD into the secondary channel. As soon as I plugged the DVD into the secondary channel with its own ribbon cable the BIOS no longer found the HD. On the Fedora Forum one person suggested that it was because I had the HD set to "master" even though it was the only thing on the ribbon cable on the primary channel. I'm sure that I have other computers that have the hard drive set to "master" when it is by itself on the ribbon cable. Bob from Fedora Forum said that I needed to have the HD set to "single" or "cable select". I was thinking that maybe my two different ribbon cables that I tried with the HD are bad, or my motherboard which is old is messed up and fails to recognize the primary channel when something is on the secondary channel.

I have had a variety of issues with my Frankenputers that I have. I'm just happy that I found something that works so that Fedora boots after the install.

Before the kernel panics I get the following errors repeated a few times:
there is also the occasional error:
I found from a google search that I should try adding nodma to the kernel commands and I will try that as well as look into the BIOS for apic settings. In the next week I hope to figure this out so I can get to work with Cinelerra and delete some of these huge videos I need to burn onto DVDs.

EDIT: nodma did nothing.

It turns out that my Maxtor 40GB drive is dead and some how was messing with the Kernel and causing it to fail. I tried using Kubuntu for a bit but it chugged along and then eventually died. Once I removed the Maxtor and repartitioned the SATA, Fedora 7 installed correctly and runs great.