Fedora installation troubles

[davejk85]

Okay, here' s the deal: I am an openSUSE fan, and have little intention of switching to anything else. But I figured that I need to at least give Fedora a try. It's an old standard in the linux world, and very popular for servers, and besides, how could a distro hopper fairly skip such a popular distro?

But it's not working so well. The installers of both Live CDs of Fedora 8 and 9 give me some cryptic exception (xml related) after the partitioning step (the errors are different but seem to refer to the same thing). The DVDs of the same two releases wont boot at all. I just get an ISO linux xx-xx.xx line and a blank screen (I often use DVDs for installations, and have never had this problem). The net install refuses to use my wlan0 device (even though the live CDs both recognise it at boot), and tries to use eth0 (which cannot be connected because of location issues). I have downloaded the various isos several times, checked the SHA1 keys, and wasted a dozen CDs and a half dozed DVDs on this. What is going on?

I just downloaded a new Live CD (Fedora 8), checked the SHA1 key, and am planning on copying the above mentioned error to post here. Meanwhile, I would actually rather use the DVD or netinstall, so if someone could give me a few clues I'd appreciate it!

Thanks.

[Dies]

Originally Posted by davejk85

What is going on?

Not sure. Posting the actual error message you're getting might help. It would probably also help to post some details about your hardware.

BTW did you run the media check ? have you tested any of these disks on other machines?

[stoat]

Hello davejk85,

That ISOLINUX thing can come in two forms (that I know about, anyway). One is like this...

isolinux: Disk error 80, AX=4224, drive 9F (example here, many more examples here)

The other one looks like this...

ISOLINUX 3.61 2008-02-03 Copyright (C) 1994-2008 H. Peter Anvin (example here)

Which one is yours? It's not clear from your post. The former one seems to have various causes. The latter, I am convinced, is from using blank disks of low quality. It's rarer, too. The data can be verified as perfect, but that doesn't mean every drive can read it consistently (sometimes even the drive that burned the disk). Anyway, if no one else has a definitive answer for you, those few links above will give you something to read and think about, a few things to try, or maybe the comfort of knowing you aren't alone. I hope you see something that helps.

[davejk85]

@Dies: Sorry, I forgot the hardware specs. Dell Dimension 3000. Um, I not quite sure what else would be applicable. It's all stock hardware.

But anyways, this last time Fedora 9 installed fine from the Live CD. Idon't have a clue why, as I didn't do anything different. Looks sharp, though. Unfortunately, I cannot boot into it. I chose not to install grub because Fedora did not recognize my other distros. I added Fedora to my openSUSE Grub menu, and Fedora starts to boot, but I am getting a boot failure; something about not mounting the root partition. I am trying to figure it out, but if it helps, here's my Grub entry:

title Fedora 9     root (hd1,8)     kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.25-14.fc9.i686 root=/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_QUANTUM_FIREBAL196036038641-part9     initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.25-14.fc9.i686.img

Fedora is on /dev/sdb9. If you see anything amiss, please let me know.

@stoat: The latter error is what I am getting. I have tried several different DVDs with both F8 and F9

[Dies]

try

title Fedora 9     root (hd1,8)     kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.25-14.fc9.i686 root=/dev/sdb9 rhgb quiet    initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.25-14.fc9.i686.img

Assuming you chose to manually partition and used only one partition -> sdb9.

If you chose the default scheme you would end up with an LVM and a /boot partition.

[davejk85]

Thanks Dies. I actually figured it out already, but thanks for your replies.