Hi,

I'm new at LINUX, but I've worked for several years with UNIX.

I'm attempting to install Fedora Core 5 on an H-P Pavilion 6835 PC. This unit has a 20G HD which is empty, but did have a Windows partition that took up the entire drive. I have 512M of RAM installed and the system starts up, but it indicates that it can not find a drive on which to install the file system.

I have no intention of installing Windows on this older machine. I have a 1.8G machine with WinXp Home coming. My plan is to use this machine as an education tool and possibly as a station computer for my amateur radio station.

Any help that I can get with this issue would be appreciated.

Ken Stringham

If you open the bios of the machine at boot time (Usually the Esc or Del key), does the bios see the drive?

I seem to remember someone saying that Fedora sometimes defaults to using the drive as a RAID array (i.e. LVM), which your old hardware may not support. I'd try using ext3.

If that doesn't work and you're going to nuke windows anyway, I would try using the GParted LiveCD and format the entire partition as ext3. Then maybe the installer will see it.

You also could always try a different distro. If you want the most "Unix"-like distro, I'd try Slackware. I personally always recommend Debian (if it's going to be a desktop, go with either testing "Etch" or unstable "Sid"). Feel free to take the quizes in my signature...

I want to thank those that suggested things to help me out. I did resolve this issue.

What I found was that my CD-R/W drive was unable to read the distribution disks. I found this by checking them on my ThinkPad 390x. The checked out fine.

I was able to install Fedora Core 5 with a NEW 56x CD-ROM drive. All is going well now.

Ken

That is a nice idea for your Amateur radio machine.

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