So after struggling for a week or two with upgrade installation problems, I finally decided to scrap the upgrade idea and just do a clean install. After a few attempts to get that to happen I decided my not so stable motherboard/processor needed replacing with something more reliable that would hopefully allow me to run the install.

So this past weekend I picked up an Asus M2A-VM motherboard and an AMD Athlon X2 4200 processor. Using that combo I now have all four hard drives plugged into an on-board RAID controller (as opposed to a combination of software RAID and PCI raid with the old mobo).

When I run the Febora 8 installer, everything looks to boot OK. I get the region dialog and then the keyboard layout dialog and then, well, then I get nothing. It hangs as soon as I click Next on the keyboard dialog. The Next button stays depressed and there is no activity either from the hard drive or the DVD drive. I've let it sit for a while and nothing seems to happen. After a couple tries with the same results, I tried using the text installation option and encountered the same behaviour.

If I remember correctly, the next dialog is the one that allows me to select which drives I would like to use for the installation. So I suspect the problem is that the installer cannot find my two RAIDs. Given that the motherboard was released in March 07 and it seems to be using a Promise RAID chip, I expected Fedora to already have the drivers for it. It seems to me like it doesn't.

So I've got two questions.
1. Am I correct in suspecting the problem is the inability of the installer to find the hard drives?
2. If I am correct, how do I get the installer to use a new driver for the hard drives? I downloaded the Linux drivers from Asus for the motherboard, which includes the RAID controller, but I don't know how to use them.

Corin

This would be likely.

Usually HDDs in a promise raid controller just look like separate drives - best practise suggests turning your (fake) raid off in bios and using 100% software raid instead (it is faster anyway, and you get more options).

Hmmm... what is the driver package?

The driver package contains the drivers for the chipset, LAN, audio and SATA/RAID controllers on the motherboard for multiple distributions and versions of linux. It seems they all come with instructions except the SATA/RAID. The file for the SATA/RAID controller is dd_raid.img.

I'm sorry' I'll be clearer.

What is the driver-package file called (the whole thing) and where did you get it?

dd_raid.img
... if this follows the usual pattern for file extensions, this is a disk image. Probably for a floppy. You are expected to write it to a floppy, and use a distro which supports installing additional drivers from removable media.

This sort of file suggests you got this off the CD that came with your distro. Check the license. Best practise is still to disable onboard RAID and use linux software RAID instead. It tends to perform better in benchmarks anyway.