Fedora Core 3 Frozen at Installation
 

Okay so it gets to the installtion part of isntalling binaries and we've check the disc with the error checking at the beginning of installation and it passed, then we check if we burned the disc correctly and it's confirmed we've done that right. Now it just freezes and I shut it down, and boot it back up and tried installing and now it freezes at the "Searching for previous versions" Etc... What is happening and how can I solve this problem?

Steve

Pure guess - the installer starts by looking at your boot loader, doesn't like what it sees and falls over.

Unless it's hard frozen Ctrl+Alt+F1 will transfer you to a text screen (where all the error messages are visible).

Ctrl+Alt+F1 totally dosen't work the whole comp basically is froze at the installation point. Any other ideas?

It's something at the kernel level if it freezes like that - either a driver, or something odd about your MBR or partitions, or a genuine hardware problem. If it isn't a dual-boot system, and you haven't resized the partitions (Partition Magic'd partitions may behave oddly afterward) then I'd check up on known driver problems with your hardware. Failing that, run a Memtest disc before you go any further.

The drivers are all working fine, until I decided to use Killdisk. Unless that may of caused any problems. The memory are all fine also which is 128MB. Could it be some settings when I'm told to choose what I want to set-up the Fedora? Or shall I replace the stick of RAM with another stick?

Steve

Not sure what you mean by Killdisk.

A complete freeze like this shouldn't be caused by a combination of settings. I've seen it with fundamental issues like ACPI, USB drivers and RAM.

Memory is weird - sometimes RAM sticks will fail with one mainboard and behave properly with another, so if you're stumped moving the stick to another slot or replacing is a reasonable thing to do.

Okay, will it work at all without memory? I've always been curious of this question.

No - the BIOS would be able to initialise and check the boot device for a boot record to point it to the OS, but it wouldn't be able to load any software.

In reality the BIOS will check for RAM and stop if there isn't any.

Text Install
 

I installed Fedora Core 3 once, had the same problem. I did a text not a graphical install and this solved the problem.
Hope this is of some use?

scoops98,

I think that's a good suggestion - the installer should automatically fall back to text mode if the graphics can't initialised, but I have heard of other cases where it doesn't.

Uhh I forgot to say, I am installing this in text mode haha
tried it at first for graphical mode and froze at the same point. Now my CD drive dosen't start up... something is oddly wrong. I stick in CD and tell BIOS to check CD Drive first... but it dosen't at all.

I think that you're isolated the problem - something wrong with the CD drive or the first CD.

Cd Drive has gone bad? So could it be the laser then... Well good thing it's an old CD Drive, and dosen't cost much for a new one. But I'ma try an experiement of this.


Done my experiement.

I removed the HDD and put it into a different working computer much better and much more powerful I can only conclude that theirs a bad sector, in the HDD to continue installation. How would I fix this bad sector since there are no O/S's installed onto this HDD and no floppydrive.

Steve