i have a p4 2.4 ghz machine with 2 hard disks 20 and 80gb.
the 20gb has win xp installed in it.
the 80gb hard disk is set as slave and i want to install fc4( as dual boot) linux in a partition of 10gb in the slave disk.
i am pretty new to linux, and when i tried installing fc4, right in the beginning itself i got a message saying input/output error failed to read dev/hda.
is it a hardware issue or a software issue?
any help will be greatly appreciated as i dont have any professional linux ppl here to help me out.
20gb is ntfs and 10 gb of the second disk is fat32 and the rest 70gb of the slave disk is ntfs is this causing some kind of a problem?

/dev/hda should be a reference to your first hard disk. If you want to install FC4 on your second hard drive, it's not supposed to write to /dev/hda unless you're planing to install a boot manager in it. I'm not familiar with Fedora. If you haven't had problems in that hard drive, it shouldn't be a hardware issue. Try specifying /dev/hdb in the installation menu or use a Knoppix CD (if available) to make some tests.