Pls Help: Cannot Boot Fedora Core 3

From: Margaret Wilson (twokatmew_at_nospam.msn.com)
Date: 04/02/05 

Date: Sat, 2 Apr 2005 09:38:09 -0500

Hello,

I am an experienced Windows administrator with a little Unix experience from
years ago. In the past, I've succeeded in installing and playing with Red
Hat. Ii find myself with some time on my hands, and I'd like to finally
learn Linux for real.

Well, I downloaded the DVD ISO of Fedora Core 3, burned the DVD and verified
that the media is good. I just ran what Fedora said is a successful
installation. I used the GRUB boot loader. But when the machine boots, it
comes up and says "GRUB", and the cursor just flashes at me. What's wrong?
Here are some details....

Mainboard: Abit NF7-S2, NForce2 Ultra 400 chipset (RAID and SATA are turned
off)
AMD Athlon XP 3200 CPU (not overclocked)
2-512MB PC3200 KingMax DDR RAM in dual channel mode
Hard drives: 2 Western Digital PATA 160GB (8MB cache) drives
Lite-On XJ-HD166S 16x DVD-ROM drive
1.44MB floppy drive
USB optical mouse
PS/2 keyboard
On-board NIC configured to use my router and DSL (house is networked)
Mainboard and DVD-ROM are running the latest firmware.

Because I have a Windows (NTFS) installation on drive 0, I set the hard disk
boot priority in the BIOS to drive 1 (slave). I created two partitions for
Fedora at the beginning of drive 1. They are:

/hdb4 ext3
/hdb3 swap

I installed Fedora on /hdb4 and installed GRUB on the MBR of drive 1. I
created the swap partition at the end of the free space on drive 1, so I
created it first, hence it being number 3, and the ext3 partion being number
4. In the past, I've sucessfully used LILO, but I let Fedora install the
default (GRUB), figuring I'd minimize problems that way. The install said
everything went fine, and to reboot. But then I get "GRUB" and a flashing
cursor. The machine just sits there. Is it waiting for something????

In my view, because I've set the boot priority to drive 1, the Fedora
installation should not even see Windows. I'm a recent SCSI convert, so I'm
used to being able to change the boot priority of the hard drive and have
the first drive behave as the master. (I realize this is a relatively new
phenomenon in the PATA world.) Any ideas as to what I should do? I'd like
to avoid purchasing new hardware:

1. I could buy a SATA drive and move my Windows installation there, freeing
up PATA drive 0 for Fedora, but I don't know that this would fix the problem
either.

2. I really don't want to repartition drive 0 to create a DOS partition for
the boot loader, as I'd have to reinstall and reconfigure Windows. Seeing
as the installation is working in tandem with another machine and my
ReplayTVs, I don't want to screw with it. Would rather spend my time on
Fedora.

3. Once I verify that Fedora Core will run on my hardware, I could throw
together a dedicated machine, as I have a few spare parts lying around and
would just have to buy hard drive, DVD-ROM and mainboard. Or I could go for
one of those EPIA VIA boards that are supposed to be Linux-compliant. But
before I spend $$ ($$ are an issue right now), I'd like to make sure I can
actually install and run Fedora.

Thank in advance for your any assistance! :-)

Regards,

Margaret
an old MCSE learning Linux

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