Alright, thanks Zathras. Fresh install it is then ... I'm sure I'll report back tomorrow again

Don't create the extended DOS partition... after creating the first parition of 50%.. Just leave the remainder.. Fedora will know what to dow ith it... just leave it bank... then you should be able to boot from the WinME CDROM and install Windows...

Do not make a drive D:

This thing you will learn with Linux is that there are no drive letters... This seems strange at first but eventually everything will make more sense than windows... You're windows drive "C:" is going to be recognized under Fedora as "/dev/hda1"

Let me try to explain this a little..

There are no drive letters in linux, everything that has anything to do with the computer falls under the root directory (or "/") from here, you have numerous folders (/etc, /dev, /mnt, /var, and more)

All hardware, and possible hardware, under linux is located in the /dev directory. "hda" is telling you that it is the master hard drive on the first IDE channel. "hda1" is telling you that it's the first partition on the master hard rive on the first IDE channel.. get it? you're Fedora install will automatically partition the remaining 50% of the drive and it will probably go something like:

Partition: /dev/hda2
Mount Point: "/"
Filesystem: Ext3
Size: xxxx MB (whatever is the remainder of your hard drive minus the swap partition.)

Partition: /dev/hda5
Mount Point: none
Filesystem: Linux Swap
Size: xxx MB (this will be around double your RAM usually, though you can change it as you see fit)

I hope you understand this a little better... I know it's a lot to absorb.. But it will all make sense in a couple weeks...

Homer:
"What a nice looking barbecue pit." (Looks at the picture on the box) "Why doesn't mine look like that?! ... WHY MUST LIFE BE SO HARD?!? WHY MUST I FAIL AT EVERY ATTEMPT AT MASONRY?!?!?"

Ok, ok ... I'm down, but not out. Talked to a friend who said they tried to partition their ~3yr old drive one time and it up and died on him. Perhaps the same is happening to me ...

We couldn't find a true windows install, only a handful of semi-useless restore cds. The windows 95 version we thought we had we apparently gave to a friend in Wisconsin, so that's shot. Conclusion: No more dual boot, only use linux. (Cheers from the gallery ... Yea!!! )

That being said, I removed partitions under the impression:

Fedora will know what to do with it... (How do you do those nice quote inserts??)

Started Fedora (I like that name, btw) and everything's going good. It starts up, I hit next, choose a language, next, choose a keyboard, next .... and then ....

white text and "you can safely shut down the computer"

In the white text it mentions two things of note:

1) Lost connection with display (some other stuff)
2) You killed/ended the application

According to "Linux for non-geeks", the next part of the install process should be choosing monitor type (which, I might add, it skipped the first time we started the fedora disk before any of the partitioning attempts). That first time we started the disk, the next screen was choosing the hard drive which, at the time, I was thinking we should partition the drives first in order to do a dual boot. Why do I think so much??? (The book even said "Trust me")

So, I figure, "Well, it must want to see a drive. Yeah, that's the problem"

Nope ... I ran fdisk again (I'm not sure what the 'f' stands for, but I have some ideas), made a 100% drive and formatted it giving it the name Mozart and restarted the Fedora CD. Got to the same point and it output the same white text. I subsequently cried myself to sleep ... ok, not really.

You can tell me "You screwed up your hard drive" now. I can take it. If that's not the case ... I'd be thrilled to hear more suggestions. It's a three day weekend ... I'll have time

damn dude.. you're bummin'... lol

I've never had that error with Fedora... It was always very simple... Are you on a high-speed internet connection?? If so, maybe try to do an FTP install of SuSE 9.1... (an installation over the internet is NOT as hard as it sounds.. it's almost transparent)

If you have a dial-up account.. that's definitely out.. I don't think your disk is F*cked... (no that's not what the "F" in fdisk stands for... it's Format Disk)

The only thing I can think of with the display error is if you have some type of oddity monitor.. I would say just keep trying the Fedora install....

You *SHOULD* get toa point that gives you installation options similar to:

- Use Entire Disk
-Use Existing Free Space
-Use existing linux partitions

something like that.. *IF* you get this far, then you should be okay... I would say just keep trying the install and possibly reset your BIOS to defaults.. and disable "Legacy USB Support" in your BIOS... (That worked for me ona laptop i installed fedora 1 on)...

Good Luck!!

I'm viochemist's wife, I just wanted to say that I've never laughed so hard in my life. Not to say that I'm not upset that we can't get this fricking thing working, but these last couple of posts had me rolling on the floor!

It's my old crap computer, I don't care if it dies a hellish death, but if we have it we might as well make some use out of it, right now it's a very large paper weight. I'm just as anxious as viochemist to wander into the wonderful world of Linux.

Well congratulations and welcome to LinuxQuestions! He seems like he's a pretty knowledgable guy.. I just wish that I could be of more help... I think it will all be fine and dandy once you get it installed.... Some hardware just has issues with the installations.. If you could, you can post the machine specs.

Processor/Speed:
RAM:
Hard Drive Size:
Brand/Model: (if applicable)
Video Card:
etc..

If you know any of these.. It could be of some help... If not, that's okay too...

Again, I would say to try setting the BIOS back to Original... and then disable Legacy USB Support, if it's listed..

Anyone else have any ideas as to how to get this guy up and running in the community??

Good news: Fedora is now working.

No bad news, really, just a strange process. I checked the BIOS, didn't do much to it, just reset defaults. I ran a scan disk on the drive, it didn't find any errors, but it made me at least feel better. Finally, I started the Fedora installer. Apparently something worked, because it worked ....

sort of.

It made it until it had 15min. left to install everything then froze. I deleted the partitions and tried again and it made it about as far as the previous posts. So, I had an ingenious idea of using the non-graphical install, and that worked fine. However, when the computer restarted, it came up with some post installation procedures and our mouse and keyboard didn't work! At that point, it was probably ok, I'll talk about that later, but I decided to try again anyways.

I once again deleted partitions and played with the BIOS (can't tell you what all I changed. Some things about DOS and Operating systems, I think) and tried the graphical install again (why shouldn't it work??). When I made it to the first menu screen I decided to look at the F1-F5 menus, just out of curiousity. One of them mentioned that some hardware setups can cause it to hang. I thought, "Well, Obviously!" The solution to that was typing 'linux noprobe' which I tried. Once again, it worked, but this time graphically. So far so good.

Now the bizarre part. The computer restarted again and came to the post installation procedures and, once again, the mouse and keyboard didn't work. Heidi and I both noticed when it was starting up that it was choosing USB devices, which we knew we didn't have hooked up. This time, instead, we decided to go grab a USB mouse I had attached to my laptop. Fortunately, it worked, but the keyboard still didn't. However we were able to get through those steps without having to type anything, we just couldn't create some users. When it came to the login screen both mice and the keyboard worked fine!! So, knowing the few things I know, we logged into root and created several users.

Interesting, eh? It's running a little slow, but it's an eMashi... i mean, eMachines with 32MB RAM. The swap space is over 100MB, and we probably will buy some more RAM in the future. That's our story, though, and I hope everyone enjoyed it and I'd like to thank everyone for helping us out. It's been an adventure!! Now I just need to find something small, maybe Damn-Small Linux, for my 2GB NEC Ready 120LT laptop

Congratulations!! Fedora is running a little slow on there because you are running the Gnome desktop... it's a great and easy to use desktop environment, but it eats up resources like homer eating donuts... lol..

You could use a less resource intensive Window Manager such as IceWM or XFCE... but personally... I would rather deal with a little lag and be able to use the full featured-ness of Gnome...

The thing I would recommend for you... that I was INCREDIBLY GREATFUL.. someone showed me when I first installed RedHat/Fedora... is to download the apt-get package managemnet system... apt-get is what Debian uses but they have made versionas available for Red Hat/Fedora/YellowDog..

visit: freshrpms.net and download the version for Fedora Core 1.... once you download that, open up terminal... and type "su -" and then the root password to gain superuser privledges... after that type "cd /directory/to/apt/install" this will probably be /home/username/whatever...

the name of the file should be apt-*.rpm (* = string of numbers)

To install it just run "rpm -Uvh apt*.rpm" and watch it it install... it will only take a few seconds... then (still with root privledges) run:

"apt-get update"

and

"apt-get dist-upgrade"

This will upgrade all of the packages installed on your system.. Do you guys have broadband internet?? If not... maybe you shouldn't run dist-upgrade...

Good Luck with it!! I was looking at Barnes & Nobels yesterday and saw the "Linux for Non-Geeks" book you said you bought... It looks pretty good... I bought the Red Hat Linux: Fedora and Enterprise Editions Bible.. This came with a full installation of Fedora and the book was a big help.. though it was like $50... But the Fedora 2 Bible is out now so I would recommend that one I guess...

As for the laptop... DamnSmallLinux is cool... and it runs natively as a live-cd distro but you can do a hard drive install.. It's okay.. though you can't do a TON of stuff with it... I would recommend looking into Vector Linux.... it's pretty small and it comes with a couple different Windows Managers.. Make sure to download the NON-SOHO version.. because SOHO is a full featured install with a lot more applications...

Let me know what you think... you can send me an email if you want too..

Your machine was probably locking up for the same reason as mine: your motherboard has features on it that are supported by the BIOS but not by Linux yet.

What I had to do was boot with a rescue disk into text mode, and edit lilo.conf.

Find the entry in there for the choice you choose to boot linux. There should be a line called "append". Add the following in there: noapic nolapic.

That turns off some particular motherboard features that Linux tries to use but can't. It causes installs to hang when they are almost finished, because that's how long the BIOS waits before sending the signal to the OS to do whatever power management nonsense or whatever it is it tries to do.

Here is the entry from my lilo.conf

image=/boot/vmlinuz-i686-up-4GB
label="linux-i686-up-4GB"
root=/dev/hde5
initrd=/boot/initrd-i686-up-4GB.img
append="noapic nolapic hdg=none devfs=mount acpi=on splash=silent"
read-only

Notice I also turned acpi=ht to acpi=on.

When I am installing, I have to choose a manual mode, and type boot: linux nolapic noapic hdg=no acpi=on or it won't install.

*sigh*

Anyway, that might have resolved your problem, and if you use Lilo, it may still.

Remember, if you edit this file (located in /etc/lilo.conf), you must be superuser to save changes, and you also must run the command lilo as superuser after you make changes to write them to the MBR.

Good luck!!!

I'm sure it is not LILO as Grub is the default boot loader for Fedora.. but you should have a similar line under your grub.conf