FC3 install problem

From: Thomas J. Andrews (tjatari_at_dreamscape.com)
Date: 11/29/04 

Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2004 09:05:55 -0500

I'm attempting to set up a dual-boot system with FC3 and Windows 98SE.
I'm new to Fedora, but not to Linux, as I have been using Mandrake for 2
1/2 years. I had some problems installing Mandrake 10.0 on this machine,
but eventually found workarounds that allowed me to do it. Now I want to
try Fedora, but I'm having very basic probles with the installer, both
graphic and text versions.

My computer uses an Athlon XP 1900+ processor on a Biostar M7VIG Pro-D
motherboard with 512 Mb of PC2100 ddr RAM. It is just over one year old,
and out of warranty. It works fine with Windows 98SE and with Mandrake
10.0, once I figured out how to set it up. The primary hard drive is a
Maxtor 40 Gb 7200 rpm. The secondary hd is an older Maxtor 8.4 Gb 5400
rpm model. I currently have two installations of Windows 98SE. The one I
use is on the primary drive, and a backup copy is on the secondary
drive. I want to keep both Windows partitions. That backup drive has
saved my bacon too many times to give it up. I want to install FC3 on
the 30Gb "unused" FAT32 partition I left on the primary drive.

I run into trouble with the installer almost from the start. Right after
I select the keyboard layout, a "bug" message pops up, saying:

Assertion (heads < 256) at disk_dos.c:486 in function
probe_partition_for_geom () failed.

with two buttons marked "ignore" and "cancel". If I press cancel, I get
a similar message, except that it says, "(heads > 0). It does the same
thing several times, with this message thrown in now and then:

Assertion ((c * heads +h) * sectors +S == A) at disk_dos.c.495 in
function probe_partition_for_geom () failed.

until eventually the installer fails.

There's something fundamentally wrong here. I believe it's one of my
BIOS settings, but I have no idea which it could be. It looks like one
for hd access, but I know too little about such things to figure it out
myself, and I don't know where to look for the answer. The only setting
I changed for drive access was to change the "access mode" from "auto"
to "LBA" after I had some problems installing Mandrake 10.0. I tried
changing that back to "auto" with no change from the FC3 installer.

Can anyone help me?

TJ

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