My nforce-3 box has two 80GB SATA drives which are NOT raid-enabled. I have installed a variety of distros (plus WinXP) on it over the last year or so without any problem whatsoever, including FC4.

On attempting to install FC5, anaconda installs the nv-sata raid driver and then insists that there is a 157GB drive which needs re-initialising with the loss of all data. When that option is declined it states that there is no available device on which to install FC5...

I have checked the BIOS and RAID is disabled throughout. Anyone know why FC5 insists that there is a raid and will not install into the existing partitions clearly identified on both sda and sdb by every other distro I have played with (ubuntu 5.10, debian 3.1, suse 10, mepis, fc4....) ?????

No idea, but you could also install it by installing FC4 and then upgrading it to Core 5. Either by booting the machine after the installation of Core4 and, from the Core5 disks and choosing "upgrade" as the install method, which shouldn't try to deal with your partitioning/HDs, or by yum or something..that's one way.

It would have to be via yum... the FC5 boot disc won't get as far as letting me choose upgrade or fresh install. I thought about using yum but I understand that its not recommended by fedora... I actually have a fully functioning FC4 install on sdb - its my main OS. Don't want to mess with this until very sure of FC5 so I wanted to test fc5 on part of sda- (where SuSe 10 currently sits...). I guess I could try yuming a test fc4.. but I'd like to know why FC5 alone objects to my sata drives...

In case anyone else is in the same boat, I found that using "linux nodmraid" enables anaconda to see the partitions on sdb. However it still refuses to upgrade from the dvd as there are "multiple partitions labelled "home"". By this I assume it refers to the linux home partition on sda (currently occupied by ubuntu). I suppose I have to relable the partitions, but w h y is FC5 - and only FC5 - so demanding? After all there is only one "home partition" on the target drive, occupied by an existing and upgradeable FC4 installation.....

Unfortunately I can't help to, but I've upgraded FC4 to FC5 with yum today. Everything works fine, except that my SATA disk disappeared (not the system disk). SATA worked fine in FC4.

The disk is attached to the SATA Sil3112 NON RAID PCI board.

Regards,
cubensys