First things first, I just bought a new laptop (HP dv5, AMD 64 Turion X2) and had Ubuntu on it. It actually took me a while to get Ubuntu installed for some reason or another and was only able to finally install it with unetbootin. It wasn't working well so I wanted to try another distro.

I went to Barnes & Noble and bought a magazine with Fedora 9 boot CD in it. Since I have a 64 bit system, I used the 64 bit install disk. When I boot up, it brings me to the initial screen and I choose a graphical install. It shows some loading sequences and then finally gets to something saying libata loaded and stays there for about 3 minutes. After that, it goes to a screen asking me for my language, keyboard layout, and then whether I'm loading from CD, hard disk, URL, etc. I say CD and it can't find a driver.

It then says I can choose from a list of drivers, but I'm not sure which one I should choose (there's around 100). One thing that was weird is that it's not really a GUI that I go through. The things asking me for my language and keyboard layout are simply blue boxes (not really graphical). This was the same problem I was having with Ubuntu. What's the problem?

I tried, just for kicks, seeing if I clicked that I was installing from the hard drive, and it said that "there doesn't seem to be any hard drives on your system". WHat could this mean?

Hi,

I hope that this can fix your problem. In your BIOS ensure your disk is set as AHCI.

Then when Linux boots from the CD, you have an option of specifying boot options. Try this:

linux askmethod acpi=off pic=noacpi all-generic-ide

Regards,
Jacques