I am new to Linux. Bought a special edition of the LinuxFormat magazine that came with 5 CD's of Fedora Core 6.

Trying to install FC6 on the slave 80GB harddrive of my Pentinum 5 3.0GHz PC. The master drive is having a WinXP partition.

Use the following steps.
(a) Wiped the slave HD clean by using a Win program to delete all existing partitions.
(b) Re-booted PC using the FC6 installer from CD drive and chose graphics interface.
(c) Installer made a complaint that the slave drive had a zero in some table (or something like that).
(d) Pressed the Ignore button and continued.
(e) Installation completed after approximately 45 minutes.
(f) Re-booted and press <esc> key to tell BIOS to boot from slave drive.
(g) Blank screen - no FC6!!!!

Later reboot from master drive. In WinXP, the partition program showed the slave drive had a small partition (<100MB) in Linux ext3 format. But the rest of the drive (>70GB) is unformatted.

One more observation: During installation, after selecting the unformatted slave drive, the FC6 installer did not ask whether I need to install the Bootloader or not. Is this critical?

Any suggestion is welcome! Thanks!

I think this has to with the installer somehow not installing GRUB... what happens if you boot off the rescue CD...? Does it give you access to the linux disc?

I expect you ordered it formatted 100% with ext3? Did you see that the installer explicitly reported it was formatting the drive? Is that were you got the "0 error" you mentioned?

I think that might be your problem or part of your problem. Isn't there an installer option to force bootloader installation? The fact that you say you just get a blank screen is strange however. Even if you had no bootloader on the Linux disc, the BIOS should have complained something along the lines of "Please insert system disk" (since it can't find the bootloader) However, the fact that it does not say anything is strange. Are you sure the target HDD is 100% working? Is it a new or an old drive?

As far as I know (and if you have backups and are up for it) you should try and install the bootloader in the MBR of the PRIMARY harddisk, and use it from there to select booting Windows OR Linux, while leaving your BIOS as set to boot from the primary disk. Thus, GRUB can take care of starting up either Windows or Linux when you boot. My setup is like this - GRUB in the MBR, and when my system starts up I can choose to boot Windows or Fedora Core 6. But then, I've got one physical disk hosting both operating systems.

Hi rylan76,

Thanks for your reply.

I re-did the above steps again. Instead of starting with an unpartitioned slave HD, this time the slave HD was partitioned.

The installer was again instructed to remove all partitions on the slave drive. But there was no more zero error complaint from the installer. I guess the partitioning before install has cured this error problem.

This time I also checked the "Review and modify partitioning layout" box on the partitioning screen of the installer. I just reviewed but did not modify the default partitioning. Strangely (perhaps due to checking this "review..." box), this time the load Grub boot loader screen appeared unlike the no-show in the previous install. Naturally, I selected the load Grub bullet point. I accepted whatever default the installer suggested in the Grub screen.

Installation completed in about 45 minutes, like last time. Now the bad news. FC6 still could not boot.

In WinXP, using a partition manager I can now see two partitions in the slave drive:
/boot ext3 101.0MB
D: LinusLVM 74.43GB

So it seems the installed files are there on the slave drive. The problem is the bootloader Grub is either not installed or installed not properly.

What option should I try? Please help. Thanks again!

ADDITIONAL NOTE AFTER POSTING THE ABOVE:
In the installer partitioning screen, it showed 2 drives, sda and sdb, were both selected by the installer for installation. I unselected sda which contains the WinXP partition. This could be the reason why GRUB was not installed properly.

Suppose I need to select both sda (master with WinXP) and sdb (slave and spare) drives. What would happen? Would the installer wipe clean my sda? That is my concern!!! Is there any way to avoid such a problem? Please suggest. Thanks!

Problem solved by the following method.

Opened the PC case. Unplugged the master drive. Installed FC6 on the slave drive which temporarily became the only HD in the PC. FC6 booted OK.

Replugged the master drive. WinXP auto booted from master drive OK.
Rebooted by pressing <esc> key to tell BIOS to boot from slave drive.
Voila! FC6 also booted OK!

Now learning the new OS on my dual boot PC!

This message is posted from Firefox running under FC6!

Glad you got it fixed!

Re your previous post, I think the mistake was as you suspected - when you are at the grub install screen, you'd need to select sda as the target of the grub installation. This would have installed grub on the master disk, and most likely you would have been able to boot either Windows or Grub as it should have been... anyway, moot point.

Enjoy Linux...