I have an MSI mother board, a AMD processor and no luck matching the two...
I have two sata hard drives. When i try to install fedora-9 it does not seem to recognize sata drives. I keep getting volGroup failures. What is mapper and volGroyup?? is also says i need a kernel before installing a initrd-what ever......my mind has gone out to lunch trying to install---please--please some one help me before i am carried off to A rubber room..........

Fedora 9 does recognize SATA drives so something else is causing your problems. Can you be more specific about exactly what errors you're getting?

The mapper maps the LVM logical volumes to devices in /dev/mapper/ as their volume names. So if you had a volume named root-volume, it would be accessible at /dev/mapper/root-volume .

As for the message about initrd, sounds like your root volume/partition isn't be mounted, so your kernel can't be run. More specific error message would help.

Do a fresh install. Something obviously went completely wrong. Do a default installation without much ado - you can add packages later when the system is running. SATA drives are no problem for Fedora 9.

I really want to thank you guys for replying. I thought this was a waste of time, but you guys really answered...GOD BLESS YOU GUYS.. I believe i have a bad mother board. This board or Linux will not give me the choice of either sata hard drives I have two maxtor HD...
During installation When asked to choose which drive to use in have only mapper. When i try raid the computer does not stop and go to raid set up , instead it by passes raid button (f10) and go to the install window...
i suppose this is a bio problem thats not fixable
It keep saying FAILURE-PARTITION CANNOT BE INSTALLED ON VOLGROUP ..

?? it the WHOLE drive set up as the default LVM if so then use gparted to blank the disk ( on file system on to and reinstall

I am new to this. I read to find things to do with Linux. The book do not tell me how to install a kernel or How to force it to partition the HD..
every thing i try i get "an error occurred trying to format vo|group01/ logvo|00. this is serious, and the install cannot continue press <enter> to exit the installer" and it disappears and start over.. It just will not install fedora-9 or any other fedora...

I DO NOT KNOW what causes this or what part to replace. I admit i am at a total loss..........

during the fedora install it asks you to use a dropdown menu to selest HOW you want to install fedora
use existing partitions
overwrite all linux partitions
and a few others that i can not remember

use the overwrite option
this will reformat the whole hard drive


and have a read through the fedora docs
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f9/
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/F9Common

you might want to google " lvm fedora " and have a read about the LVM that is with fedora
a start
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical...Manager_(Linux)