I have not been able to install fedora core 5. I have three hard drives on my system. Two IDE and on SATA. If I boot the installer disc with the defaults, the installer never starts up. It will come to the X screen and just display a mouse pointer and stop. I found out that I can get the installer to start if I run a linux noprobe option. So the installer seems to lock up on the sata_via driver. That would not be a problem because I do not want to install it on my SATA drive. So now the installer starts and when you select which partition to install the drive on the device it sees is mapper/pdc_eggaahef. This seems to match up with one of the IDE drives in my system, but the free space is not correct. I also switched to the console at this point and ran fdisk -l and the system is able to see both hard drives. Does anyone have any suggestions to get the installer to see both IDE hard drives? It seems that the device mapper is not working correctly on my system. Any suggestions would be helpful.

I guess you have a motherboard with some kink of bios/software raid controller installed. I had the same kind of problem with two of my disks being seen as only one by the mapper (I guess this is the case with your 2 ide disks) no matter how I would set my bios. My solution was rather trivial: I unplugued all disks leaving only the one where I wanted to install the boot and system partitions in. It was then seen as a usual /dev/hdx device.

Once FC5 installed, I plugued the other disk in and used at my will.

Disabling the hard drive worked. Thanks for the help.