Well what I need to do is boot my DVD that I created so I can install FC3..... thing is my DVD drive is on my PCI IDE Controller...... which means my mobo won't boot from it..... so I have no clue what to do.... so I ended up asking on #fedora on freenode.... got a few answers but didn't understand a bunch of it.... mostly all I saw was something about point grub to the dvd and stuff but I didn't understand how to do it. So any ideas?

Thanks for any help!

which OS do u use now?

if you actually have GRUB, it shouldn't be a problem, even if i'm a newbie and haven't done that. but if you have windows of some kind, then i don't know what to tell you. do u have cd drive besides dvd drive? if so, then you can create a bootable cd-rom with boot.iso and boot linux with it, and then running the instalation from dvd by taking the above mentioned cd-rom out of cd, so linux installer can find dvd media.

dude... my DVD drive and cd-rom are both on the pci ide controller so that wouldn't help anyways

also running windows xp right now....

yes, u r the lucky one

and what OS do u have? if it's linux, you can create bootable floppy with grub, from wich you might try to start instalation from dvd if nothing... well ...

cool ...

well... let's hope some1 better than me will come by

Anyone? :|

no one? :|

I guess no one knows how to get this to work ?_?

*makes a puppy dog face and hopes someone knows how to do this*

Ok just to get a better understanding... you have two IDE channels on your MOBO? Are they both full with hard drives (I assume so otherwise you wouldn't be using a PCI card). Also how old is your mobo bios and mobo for that reason. Many mobos and bios' will support booting from PCI cards and this can all be set up in the bios... check your manufacturers website.

Basically pretty much anything is possible but it may take some fiddling... the advice I was given and now swear by is... get a cup of coffee.... take a deep breadth.... try try and try again.... oh and read lots Google is a great resource along with searching on here....

If you reply with the answers to the questions above I might be able to suggest something.

ok.... here is the deal..... first off.... ide0 works perfectly fine and has 2 hdds on it.... ide1 is dead and says unknown when and when nothing is plugged into it... tried reset and shit but it does not work. My mobo isn't that old its from Dell my pc is a Dell Dimension 2400 and the mobo is 0G1548. And nope this mobo does not support booting from PCI cards. I tried google.... I also switched my DVD to be on ide0 as slave... I can boot into the dvd setup for fedora core but it won't let me install or do anything to the hard drive on the pci card.

The reason you cannot do it is because the installation requires extra drivers for your PCI card to use the hard drive. If it was me in your situation I would re-partition your other drive on the IDE0 channel in windows using partition magic or similar. This will be non destructive but will allow you to install linux. I would then partition the other drive to give you sensible space for both operating systems.

At first you will probably need 6-8 gig for a reasonable install of FC3.. ok so the OS and all installed apps themselves will only take up about 4 gig but that leaves you some head room to play. How big is your main IDE drive?

Once linux is running you can then find and install the drivers for your PCI card. Once this is up and running you can link the other drive to your Linux OS and viola....

What do you think?

That's not going to work because my main drive has been filled and there is no way in heck i am going to reinstall windows xp again for a long while. So is there any other way?

But if you're going to use the other drive surely you can move some of the data from the XP drive onto the other drive and re-partition it?

There probably is another way i.e. finding the correct drivers for your PCI card and using these when you install linux...