Greets all. I am trying to install Fedora 16 off the live disc and when it comes to partitioning, it thinks my hard disc is blank. If I click the option to retain data, it then tells me there is no usable storage medium for installation. Presently, we're talking about an older P4 Dell with 2gb DDR ram and a 400gb hard drive, which has nothing but a primary partition of 50gb for Plan9 and is as such using the Plan9 bootloader. The partition is obviously active, so what can I do? I would be willing to let Fedora wipe the drive and install Plan9 later if someone can help me do so; I don't know a single thing about grub2. I am not a Linux newbie but am also not mega-advanced, and the last time I used Linux I was running Slackware 9.

Anyway, thanks to whomever

Not sure I understand the situation. If you've booted a Fedora 16 live CD, you can't retain any changes to the running system.

Is the problem that you can't install F16 on the hard drive? Grub2 can install itself either in the hard drive's MBR or in the Fedora partition and can chainload another bootloader. I'm not familiar with Plan9, and don't know if you can use it to chainload another bootloader.

Sorry, what I was trying to say is I have a 400gb hard drive that at one point was absolutely blank. I installed Plan9 and was using it as a data server of sorts, very partial to Plan9. At any rate, it has it's own bootloader in the mbr that is incapable of booting other systems.

Now to Fedora. I decided I wanted to dual boot my machine and use Fedora for a personal system. I booted the live CD, standard from Fedora's site and during the install, it couldn't see that there was an OS on the only partiton on the hard drive already. I believe Grub2 is the problem here; it can't detect the other OS.

If I try to make a custom partitioning scheme, I lose access to booting Plan9. I even stuck a 120gb drive in as a secondary and installed Plan9 there. Can't find a way to boot into it. Any suggestions?

If you install Fedora with grub2 on the Fedora partition (and keep your Plan9 partition and its bootloader in the MBR intact, can you use the Plan9 bootloader to chainload grub2? If not, I'd start investigating other bootloaders.

Sorry I can't be of any real help here.