Problem with Installing Fedora Core on Compaq Presario 2500 series Laptop
 

Hi,
I am trying install fedora core on my compaq presario 2500 series laptop. I am actualy new to linux and this is the first time I have installed linux on my computer. Fedora core got installed succesfully and rebooted. After the reboot it was seting up a few things and just frooze while seting up local hard drives. I waited for it to complete for about 30 mins but no good. I had to shutdown the laptop using the power button. While installing I had set-up a dual boot system using grub on different partitions on same hard drives. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Welcome to LQ. What's the other system you have installed (Windows?) and can you boot into it? In either case, it would be help if you could describe your partitioning scheme, and also to post the contents of your GRUB file (if possible) Can you at least boot up Linux using the installation CD? -- J.W.

This might help:

http://www.linux-laptop.net
http://www.akiaki.org/linux/presario.2500.HOWTO.html

If he could install Slackware (not easy) Fedora will probably install too.

Hi J.W.
Thanks for replying. Lemme explain you in detail what all I did. I have a 60gb HDD on which first partition is a 20gb NTFS partition and I have WinXP Pro on that. Then I had left 10gb unformatted space for linux next to my first partition and allocated rest of the space to a FAT32 partition for my other stuff. Fedora setup showed me some error while configuring the partions. I think it said "couldnt setup partition " or something like that. So then I deleted the other partition I had and left it unformatted. So now I had a 20gb NTFS partition with WinXP Pro on it and rest of 40gb as unformatted space. Now in the fedora setup I selected use the existing freespace option and it worked (which didnt work last time) and everything got installed fine. After installation when it rebooted it went thru all the text and went to GUI and was seting up some hardware I guess. After setting up local hard drives it froze and nottin happened for about 30min. I had to shut-down using my power button. When I start my laptop grub lads up and windows also works fine. But when I try to boot linux same thing happens again. And yeah how do I look into the GRUB file?

Thanks

mavpredator - Cool - so you've got 20G for XP and 40G for Linux. It sounds like you've done everything correctly, so I'm not certain why the installation would have (apparently) succeeded the first time, but now is giving you a hard time. While this might not be the most elegant solution, this is what I'd suggest considering.

1. Reinspect how your drive is partitioned. I personally think BootIT NG is an excellent utility program, and if things look like they're just hosed up it might be worth dropping the Linux partition(s) and then recreating them. Note of course that this would require a reinstall of Fedora, which admittedly is a pretty severe approach. Given that you'd be unlikely to lose any important data though, it might be the easiest way to starting over with a clean slate. In my experience it is always better to take care of the partitioning work prior to beginning an installation, rather than to address it as one of the steps within an installation.

2. If you do decide to go this route, hopefully any partitioning related errors will vanish. If not, and you do encounter any errors, be certain to capture the exact text.

3. As for viewing the current GRUB file, you'd need to be able to boot into Linux, which may be possible using the installation CD. I'm not sufficiently familiar with Fedora to know if this is an option, but you may be able to boot an installed Linux system using the Fedora installation CD operating in Rescue mode. The idea is similar to Windows "Safe Mode", where the system boots to a minimal state, and puts you at a command line prompt. From there you would need to go to directory containing GRUB, then capture the contents. -- J.W.

OK, I have a few questions:

1. How much space should I leave for linux? Because I need to create another partition for my stuff out of that 40gb left.

2. Does it matters if I leave space for linux in between two partitions or at the end (thats after the two partitions).

3. How do I format a partition using VFAT so that its visible to both windows and linux.

Thanks

1. Partitioning is highly subjective decision. If you've got 40 total, perhaps you could just split it 20G for Linux and 20G for your other partition. I would give Linux at least 10G, more if you have a lot of music and/or video. Similarly, if you know that, say, 5G is all you'd need for the other partition, then give everything else to Linux. There's no real right or wrong answer, it depends on what your plans are for Linux.

2. No. Linux will be happy in whatever partitions you want to install it into. They do not have to contiguous, nor are they required to be placed at either the front or the back of the drive.

3. You should be able to use the command "mkdosfs". On the other hand, if you do your partitioning first, and you are using BootIT, you could format the partition right then.

-- J.W.