fedora 17 mostlikely will not install on an old computer that had xp installed

now you do meet the bare Min. specs

but on a Pentium 4 cpu and ONLY a gig of ram
it will BE VERY VERY VERY SLOW
so slow as to be almost unusable

fedora IS going to want a "/boot" partition of 768 meg to 1 gig
and a "/"partition of about 20 gig ( 12 Min. )
and a "/home" partition of 5 gig
and a "SWAP" partition of 2 Gig
but i would double ALL those sizes to be safe with using fedora

a better choice for this computer is CentOS6 and the xfce desktop
or in the Debian camp
LinuxMint - Xfce desktop

also there can ONLY be 4 primary partitions on a drive
however the 4th can be a "logical" partition and then divided up
BUT /BOOT MUST be on a PRIMARY it dose not HAVE to be the MBR BUT it must be a primary

you WILL need to reformat the whole drive
reinstall WindowsXPsp3
then install linux
ANY of the 8 to 10 year OLD guides for installing linux with XP will do
the "dd" method has NOT changed and you can use windows xp "boot.ini" to point to the 512 byte image you made with "dd"
just ignore the use of a 3.5 in floppy
ALL modern linux distros can write to the windows NTFS partition

I had the same problem, except my laptop was running Windows 7... I found that HP had cut themselves a 200MB partition, and that all other partitions couldn't be resized. I ran Fedora 17 from a USB drive, and on install I got the same boot error, then when I rebooted it I had a messed up MBR (screen said "missing operating system"). When Staples (I was on vacation and they were the only remotely tech-savy people) refused to help me I nuked Windows,installed openSUSE 12.1 everything was fine. I never did figure out the Fedora issue though... I jut assumed I had a bad copy of it or something.

GRUB 2 requires a block of unformatted space between the MBR and the first partition. It installs some of its boot images in that space.

If you can boot from a CD or USB, any of the live rescue CD distributions that contain gparted can be used to move your partitions a bit to leave the necessary space. (IIRC, 1 MB should be sufficient.)

The guide to Fedora installation is
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/...ide/index.html
The advice there is
CPU: P3 passible, P4 advised
swap partition: 2GB
boot partition: 250MB.
root partition: 5GB

It's better to make /boot larger than the minimum, in case it grows with time, although you can do without a separate partition if you use an ext filing system for root and don't let Fedora give you LVM.

The conclusion of all this is that your computer would run Fedora. Mine has much the same specifications, and I tested F17 on it with no problems: in my case with just 1GB swap and 7GB root! The problem is not a hardware one.

Off the top of my head — no checking done, so I may be talking rubbish — I wonder if you let Fedora create logical volumes and made /boot one. I don't think Grub will run from inside a LVM system.

Thanks a lot, but I had been used fedora 15 before with windows Xp with this configuration.

Thanks Mr MacCann.. I will try this out.

GRUB 2.0 does, in fact, "understand" logical volumes, although I (personally) think they're silly for systems not having several dozen hard drives.