I have built my own PC and am currently trying to use Fedora Core 4 x86_64.

The installation process for Fedora ran very smoothly, it was installed as the only OS on my computer onto my striped SATA drives (spec below), this is my only drive - grub was loaded to the MBR.

Unfortunately when I rebooted the computer after the install, Fedora did not start. My computer acts the same as before the installation process (when there was nothing on my hard drive); it goes through the bios routine, looks for a boot sector on the DVD then moves on to the second boot option, the HDD, and then hangs/cursor blinks.

To me it appears that it cannot find the boot sector on the HDD - am I correct and is there a solution/workaround?

The kernel is 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 x86_64 installed from DVD

the spec:
AMD Athlon 64 3200+
Gigabyte GA-K8N Ultra-9 (nForce4 Ultra chipset)
2x 250Gb SATA HDD - striped to a single 500Gb

I've googled for a solution for quite a while, but as I'm a relative newbie I might be missing something!

thanks

The SATA drives are using the Sil3114 controller, onboard the motherboard

switched to the nVidia SATA controller - same problem occurs.

I tried to install CentOS - same problem
I tried installing windows (shock gasp!) to see if it was a problem specifically with Linux, but no Windows x64 pro gives the same problem, except with an error message "A disk read error occurred, Press Ctrl+alt+Del to restart"

So it is obviously some sort of problem with my hardware if both Linux and Windows refuse to boot.
Both install to the hard drives fine, so it is not a critical error with my hard drives or controller.
I believe it might be something to do with the boot sector (something i have very little knowledge of)

I have discovered the solution, to my problem!

The problem was with the generic drivers provided with the OS (both Linux & Windows)

I had to download the correct drivers from the nVidia website, my motherboard chipset manufacturers. (Making sure I got the correct ones for an AMD x64)

The problem arose as I did not have a floppy drive (so old school!)
had to find one on an old 486 residing in a computer scrap heap and fit it into my computer.

Then transferred the relevant drivers from the downloaded folder to my floppy and install them during the installation of the OS.

easy peasy once you know how!

Its good too see you have worked out your own problem LOL

I wish more computers users where like you, instead all they know is "Its broke - Fix it now and I dont want to know why or how"

cheers for the comment!

I managed to get my problem fixed ok, but I am not having the best luck with the nVidia motherboard in general: it reboots the computer whenever I unplug or plug anything into the USB and other little annoyances like that. As I spent so long fixing it so that it would boot from SATA I really don't want to mess around with it to fix the USB problem, incase the SATA problem occurs again! bit of a catch-22 really.

I hear you there man.

I've had similar USB problems. Powered down, plugged in a new USB printer or something and reboot to a kernel panic.

As far as SATA, lately ive been looking into it a lot. It seems the best way to do it (if you want to spend some cash) is to get a high end Serial ATA PCI card. Get one with an onobard CPU, this gives you true hardware RAID. Even the pickiest Linux and BSD systems will see it as one true hard disk. For software RAID with like a Sil3114 or NVIDIA chip you need to see the manufacture for a download. Also look into something called 'raidtools', I am. Someone told me you can do software RAID on Linux with it. But it seems to me you would need it at install time, not once you are up and running, so dont ask me how it works.

Good luck. Linux can be tricky but dont go back to Windows. Keep plugging away. I am.

--eric aka h0nke