getting fc5 to work

[pinax50 0]

I run a Athalon 64 x 3200 desktop stand alone unit. I was running XP pro and tried to load FC5 onto the pc by following the prompts as they appeared on the screen and when it said "finish" I hit that.

When I start the computer it runs through it's checks and has a fault against "terface Etho" which states that " Info for etho failed no link present, check cable" What does that mean?

All other checks are OK.

Then the Fedoraboot page comes up and indicates it is initialising stuff. After initialising Network the sreen goes black and all activity stops. Only the monitor light blinks at me.

As I am only good at following propmts speak slowly and simply to me.

Thanks for any help

Don

[danleff 0]

Quote:

I run a Athalon 64 x 3200 desktop stand alone unit.

Can you be more specific about what you mean by a stand alone unit.? This means different things to differnt folks. Make and model of the system please.

Interface eth0 refers to the NIC connection on your system. Are you connected to the Internet? If by a stand alone unit, you mean that you are not connected to the Internet, this message means nothing, just that Fedora found no active NIC connection.

Without knowing exactly what you mean by "following the prompts" it's hard to know what default settings that you chose for the installation. However;

1. If the bootloader was installed (as it seems that it was, because you get to booting Fedora), then apparently you got through the installation. How long did the installation process take?

2. When you chose the option to partition the hard drive, what exact option did you choose? There are three. One (the default) is to delete all linux partitions and install Fedora. If you had all your space taken up by the Windows XP installation with NTFS filesystem, this could explain one possible problem.

I assume that there is only one hard drive in the system that you installed Fedora to?

Do you know what video card is in the system, if you installed one other then what came with the system?

But knowing about your system and the hardware in it, will help.

Post any information that you think might be helpful.

Understand, that answering your question is difficult, unless we know more information, such as if the system is compatible with Fedora to begin with. it's knda like asking "my car has an 8 cyl. engine in it and I just installed a new carburetor. It won't start, what could be wrong?"

[pinax50 0]

Thanks for the reply Danleff.

I shal give you system specifics, answer the points you raised and tell you what I did today with the same outcome as before.

AMD cpu Athalon64 3200 + 939 socket; Hynix DDR RAM 512 MB DDR 400; ASUS A8DLX MB-via, SKT-939, AGP, Snd, GbLAN, RAID, SATA; Sapphire VGA card 9250- 128 Mb; Western Digital HD-120GB JB, 7200 prpm, 8Mb cache; Netcomm Fax/Modem IN5920- 56k, Internal,v92,PCI and a DVD burner.

At present I am not connected to any net though in a couple of weeks I will be hooking into a wireless network and will be installing a Netgear WG602 Access point and a Netgear GA311 PCI network card. Will there be any issues with installing this later?

It took about 20 mins to do the installation after working throgh the prompts.

At the partitioning stage I followed the default to "delete all Linux partitions and install Fedora". There is still over 100gig of disc space on the only hard drive installed on the machine.

Today I re-installed it without network and again with the default partitioning and the same result.

After reading some of the issues on the site about partitions I think that is the problem. As I don't mind if I lose the data on the computer I would be happy to get rid of the Windows program and only run FC5 so I assume if I select "remove all partitions"

I may get over the bump.

Your help appreciated

Don

[danleff 0]

You are probably correct. Let's look at what may have happened.

 

Quote:

At the partitioning stage I followed the default to "delete all Linux partitions and install Fedora".

 

If you did this the first time, as well, understand that you had NO Linux partitions on the system, if Xp was the only OS installed, and the hard drive is occupied by one large partition.

 

If you take a look at the Fedora installation instructions for partitioning, located here, you will see that you have three basic auto-partitioning options.

 

1. Delete all Linux partitions and install Fedora. If you have Linux partitions on the drive and want to overwrite them to use with Fedora, you choose this option.

 

2. Remove all partitions on selected drives and create default layout. This option erases and reformats the entire drive to use with Fedora.

 

3. Use free space on selected drives and create default layout. Use this if you have free, non-formatted space on the drive that Fedora can use.

 

Quote:

I would be happy to get rid of the Windows program and only run FC5 so I assume if I select "remove all partitions"

 

This is fine, if this is really what you want to do. If not, and you want to keep Windows, I would make enough free space on the drive to install Fedora to and choose option #3.

 

You can do this a number of ways, from within Windows XP, by using a partition manager like PartitionMagic, or a Live CD, such as a SystemRescue CD. Finally, you can also modify the partition by using Segate's Utility, available on their website.

 

Quote:

There is still over 100gig of disc space on the only hard drive installed on the machine.

 

If you say that you have 100 gigs of space on the drive, is this free, non-formatted space, or is it occupiued by one or more Windows partitions?

 

BTW, is the hard drive sata, or an IDE drive (pata)?

 

 

[pinax50 0]

Originally I chose option 1 and after it didn't woork I went to option 2.

As I only have music and photos on the HD I am happy to only run FC5 as I have all the discs anyway.

I am away at the moment and don't have the Windows disc so I can't go back. It's FC5 for me.

Today I was given Knoppics and ran that ok.

But with Fedora after the start up where it says loading up, the blue "progress bar" reaches the end and the screen goes black and activity ceases.

I have spoken to the person who gave me the copy of FC5 and he suggests 1 more try.

It is a SATA hard drive.

 

 

[danleff 0]

Quote:

Originally I chose option 1 and after it didn't woork I went to option 2.
As I only have music and photos on the HD I am happy to only run FC5 as I have all the discs anyway.
I am away at the moment and don't have the Windows disc so I can't go back. It's FC5 for me.

Ok, I thought from your description, that Windows was still installed. So, you can't use Windows to resize the drive partitions.

Knoppix has a utility called qtparted which can graphically give you an idea what the partition structure is on the drive. It would be interesting to see what partitions are on the drive now.

The other way is to type in, as root user in knoppix, in a terminal window;

fdisk -l (that's the small letter L in -l)

then post what that says.

but i suspect one of two other possible issues.

1. Did you check the validity (integrity) of the installation DVD at the beginning of the installation?

2. Your graphics card. This is an ATI video card on the system, correct?

3. Just for the sake of completness, what exact model is the motherboard? Asus has a couple of A8 via based motherboards out there.

A8V
A8V-E SE
A8V-MX

[pinax50 0]

Thanks Danleff,

The motherboard is an A8V.

Unfortunately I have to leave it for awhile as I am off on holidays.

I shall be bak next Thursday and try and pick up the thread and will have tried the things you suggested.

Don