Cant find hard disk with Fedora Cora 5
 

Friends, I am absolutely new to the world of Linux and its installation. I have been, however, keeping myself busy reading articles on installation procedures. Unfortunately, however, I have hit a stumbling block.

I have a 80 GB IDE HDD. Whenever, I try installing Fedora Core 5 installation from the internal DVD Writer, it says that it cant create a file system on a valid media (or words to that effect implying that there is no hard disk drive).

Incidentally, I checked the BIOS on my PC and it lists the internal DVD Writer as primary IDE and the hard disk drive as secondary. Does this matter?

I desperately need your help...

I'm not sure if it will solve your formatting problem but yes the bootable hard drive should be on the primary channel and set to be the master. The DVD drive ideally should be on a seperate channel (secondary). If you have the DVD drive on the same channel as a hard drive the hard drive gets slowed down. Move things around and see if that helps. Also have you already formatted the hard drive previously with another OS?

Thanks Ryan for your quick response. As yet I havent experimented with turning around the drives from primary to secondary and vice versa. And yes, the HDD is already formatted and installed with Windows XP Service Pack 2.

I have tons of unutilized space of 55.00 GB and above. Following are the brief specs of my PC:

P4 2.66 GHz Dual Core.
80 GB IDE SATA HDD
512 MB DDR RAM
ASUS Motherboard
ASUS DVD-Writer

Is there anything else that I need to furnish to help in solving my problem?

2 questions.
1. When you were installing Fedora what exactly did you do regarding partitioning and formatting the unused space? What did the partition sceme look like?
2. Your HD cannot be IDE and SATA, it's either/or. Is it SATA or is it IDE?

Sorry Ryan about the mispost on the HDD part. It is a 80 GB SATA HDD.

At first I did a partition with Windows XP which looked something like the following:

1. Primary partition: 10 GB, balance remaining unused.
2. Next from Windows XP (after installation, etc.) using the manage option (by right-clicking on My Computer) I installed a logical drive "D" on the extended partition.
3. The "D" drive, thus created, was of 15 GB, leaving a balance of almost 55.00+ GBs of unutilized space.

4. Restarted the PC and set the BIOS option of booting to read from CD first.
5. Started up with the Fedora Linux Core 5 CD-1, and the rest as they say is history.

Besides, at one point of time, it also stated that could not find device drivers for HDD.

Please help.

Ryan, I used the Windows XP to format the primary partition in FAT32 format. Not the NTFS type. Hope this helps.

Ryan, searching through the forums I came upon the following post:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...t=SATA+problem

Per this post, I should not have any problems with Fedora Core 5 and SATA. But then again, I do have a problem.

Should I try switching the primary and secondary master and see if things work?

Hi Satadru

At what point is the installatuion failing?
Are you able to get to the portion of partitioning the drive? Provide clear information as to where the installation fails then i can help you on this one. It does not sound a major problem.

Thanx
broken maize

Thanks Maize.

The installation fails while attempting to detect the hard drive. It throws up a list of drivers to select. I tried selecting all the SATA drivers that I could find from the list. All this to no avail :-(

Please help.

I forgot to add, an X-Windows interface does start up. Beyond that point, it displays the message that no hard disk drive was found.

The problem sounds like FC 5 doesn't have the device driver for your HDD. It may be possible to load the device driver at the beginning of the installation. I would need to know what model and number your HDD is in order to find the device driver. Your other option would be to download FC 6 and try that. The proper device driver might already be included in FC 6's kernel. Can you give me the model and number of your HDD?

Ryan you may yet turn out to be a real life saver. However, at this point of time, I am away from my home and, therefore, would be unable to provide you with the complete details. However, I do recall that the first few initials began with "ST".

I am afraid I can only get back to you with the complete specifications not before 10 hours at the very least :-(

Downloading FC6 may not be a viable option for me. Download speeds available in my region arent satisfactory for downloading 2.0 GB worth of stuff, even at the best of times. Hence, I would have to make do with FC5. Else wait for one of the IT magazines to come up with the FC6 distro free.

No worries. When you get the info let me know and we'll see if this can be solved. I have subscribed to this thread so I will get an e-mail when you post next.

Thanks once again for taking the trouble. Will do as promised.

Ryan, as advised, I furnish below the details:

Hitachi Deskstar 7K80 HDS728080PLA380 Hard Drive
80GB - 7200rpm - 300MBps Serial ATA - II - Serial ATA/300 - Internal

Please please help.