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You updated the bios...got the 3 beep codes, but the system is booting normally now? If so, let's move on with your install.
yes, system seems to be fine now
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You tried Mandrake. Did this install at all, or fail at the partitioning section?
Mandrake had similar 3 beep code crash, I could try installing Mandrake once again now that that problem seems to be fixed (does 10.1 use a 2.4 kernel, I'm not sure but I thought somewhere said it did [<2.4.22 is preferable])
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You had Fedora Core 3 installed. Did you attempt to install Core 1 over the Core 3 installation, or wipe the drive and start the install of Core 1 and just tell it to accept default partitioning?
yes, the drive was wiped out, fc3 used completely different partitioning and fc1 formated all the newly created partitions
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Do you have Windows on this system at all, or just Linux? If Windows, is the Windows install XP using the NTFS filesystem?
Yes, I do have an XP installed on one drive and surprisingly that has been reliable during all of this. I have all different OSs on their own didicated drive, I have 8 drives floating around which I nomilly run 5 at a time along with 3 CD drives. During all this messing around I have anywhere from 1 to 5 plugged in (good thing I have 500Watt PS and many power and IDE cables, cause I have drives laying all over swithcing between them)
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Do you have a sata drive on this system, or ide; or a combination of the two?
All my drives are IDE, however I do have sata on mb
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Grub is failing because it can't read the disk partition. If you had failed prior or successful installs and tried to over-write the partition each time (did not re-format) this can be a problem.
I have reformated the partitions everytime, and since I give the install the complete drive I figured would write the MBR corretly the way it wants to, and since it does start loading GRUB I figure it doesn't have a problem reading its own partition.
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Grub may not be reading stage 1.5 or 2 correctly because of the partition confusion on each install, how did you set up the bootloader? Did you tell the Fedora Core 1 install to over-write the MBR?
Sorry, I remembered the message wrong, it is: GRUB loading statge2.read error
So it is stage 2 if that helps
One note that I also thought of now too is that some of the installations would seem to mix up my drives. I would normally plug the drive I'm installing an OS into the mb primary master, which I would think would be hda, but sometimes shows up as hde which would be my IDE PCI card primary master. All the fc installs I think were always as hda though.
I tried booting from a fc3 install, where grub works to the fc1 and works fine
hope this gives you a better idea
