fedora 11 - fails to boot after install

[cganya]

when i put in the disk and install fedora 11, it finishes by telling me it needs to reboot into fedora 11 to finish. after rebooting my computer it fails to detect a hard drive with an operating system on it, it then boots from the CD and my options are to install again or rescue.

tried three times already but i'm installing yet one more time to make sure it isnt a user side mess up.

does anyone know whats going on?

-edit- seems i had to be right there to pop out the disk while it was rebooting before it chose the boot location, even choosing reboot to hard drive from the installation CD would not work.

-edit2- aahhhhg! it was working but i shut it down useing the OS. all i did was disconnect the DVD drive from the second connector on the ribbon (the case doesent have the hard drive and disk drive slots close enough >.<) so that i can run the computer without its parts hanging out and now it wont detect the hard drive again >.<

[stoat]

Hello cganya,

Maybe you should double-check the master and slave jumpers on those two drives to make sure that it all makes sense with the DVD connected and disconnected. For example, if you have them jumpered to cable select, the drive at the end of an 80-conductor ribbon is the master. Who knows what that will do when you take it away. It also wouldn't hurt to review the BIOS drive order. Anyway, you get the idea. Something along those lines.

[cganya]

i tried that as well, the DVD drive doesent have a jumper selection for master/slave/cable select. the hard drive is set to master.

i've been going over and over it and the best i can get now is a disk read error after it verifies the pool data as part of the boot up.

hard drive comes first in the boot sequence
cmos is configured to use both sata and pata (enhanced mode) but doesent change the result with any selection

i'm going to bring in my hard drive to my college tomorrow to see if i can get it tested for errors or something, this is getting to be silly, i have had no success with linux on three seperate occasions with three diffrent computers.

trying a diffrent pata hard drive at this time, if it doesent just plain work i'm going back to windows for a few years >.<

-edit- sorry about the long delay if anyone was waiting on a reply. its working on the new hard drive.

mother has chest cancer, was reason for the delay