Hi everybody, it's my first post since years as I generally get answers easily before I need to. And this post may be quite long.

Hardware:
Mobo - MSI K7N2 Delta ILSR
Proc - AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Barton
RAM - 1.25Mb (2x512+256) DDR 333
Video - Leadtek Winfast A280TD
Sound - SB Live 1024 (Mobo's sound disabled)
Network - use Mobo's
Promise Ultra 100TX2
Pinnacle PCTV Pro

I use extractable for the first disk so I can boot 2K, XP... without dualbooting.

For the purpose of installing Linux, I use a dedicated disk and disconnect all others physically, so it's the only disk in the system during install. Currently I use an IBM Deskstar IC35L080AVVA07-0 (80Gb).

I've dl the FC2 DVD iso and burnt and booted (no problem there).

After many trials, the story is always the same:

Install goes smoothly, no errors, no weird messages, until reboot.
Then DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK...

I must add that I've got the same problem with MDK 10 and Gentoo 2004.1

I've been reading hundreds of posts and links and I tried many of the solutions given.

I've some additional info to give:
1 - with Rescue CD, I've no problem to mount the system and browse folders, search files; all the data are accessible.
2 - this evening I've put the same disk in my son's PC (MSI KT3 Ultra 2) and did the install with success on booting (great!). Then, with some excessive hope, I put this disk in my PC and got the same error.

In between, I've tried many tricks (change disk with completely new one (40Gb); change disk mode from auto to lba, large and chs).

While searching I've been aware of geometry problems with the FC2 kernel and I read many posts about dualbooting. In BIOS, LBA indicates C:10011, H:255, S:63, while fdisk reports C:159560, H:16, S:63. But this is not a dualbooting issue.

I even tried a new installation after wiping the disk with IBM's Feature tools (complete erase: quite long!).



Any possible clue or even a beginning of a clue, would be very very appreciated, as I really like the Fedora Core distro (I've installed it successfully with VMWare Workstation 4.5.1 on XP).

Your problem may be that your BIOS is incapable of booting a disk at whatever address you installed the IBM Deskstar disk. As a test I suggest that you create a boot floppy when you install and see if you can boot with the boot floppy.

___________________________________
Be prepared. Create a LifeBoat CD.
http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeBo...home.page.html

Steve Stites

Thanks for your advice. I tried many combinations, other distros... and finally found an internal cable problem with the removable case I was using!

I like a lot fc2 but I havent been able to make it with my GeForce4 Ti4800 SE and the NVidia driver (tried many suggestions; kernel from linuxant, kernel.org...), just doesnt display anything but doesnt seem to freeze (Xorg.0.log file ends with a '8x agp succesfully initialized').