Upon closer examination, it appears that Windows assigned the remaining space as drive letter F even though I never knowingly asked it to. All I stupulated was 100GB of space to be partitioned.....so, I am prepared to either re-install Windows again or re-size upon someones recommendation...hmmm....didn't have this problem on the last install on another machine.
 
 

This is why I don't like to use Windows setup to format the hard drive. Take a look at this article on formatting the drive with XP setup.
 
If XP is working fine, take a look at the F drive and see if it is empty. If it is, defrag the C drive.
 
Then you can use the Disk Management utility to delete the F drive partition desigation. See the Microsoft article on the subject here.
 
Then try to reinstall Fedora.

Thanks for your insights and opinions regarding XP. So far, unfortunately, its the only OS that I can get working on my machine.
 
I used disk management to go in and delete the F disk as well as the two areas that the Fedora install created. The partition table indicated one partition...a C: partition of the size I stipulated...100 GB, leaving approximately 56 GB unused where I still am attemtping to put FC5. I say still because after doing as you suggested, I again received the same error causing FC5 installation to abort. SO, at this writing, while I am at work, my system is busily re installing XP after re-partitioning and formatting(NTFS). If the FC5 format attempt fails again, I will abandon NTFS and use the FAT32 file structure.
 
As always, your assistance is greatly appeciated.
 
John
 
 

Hi,
There are two things to check here!
1) check your installation disk. Ie may be there is a problem in the cd/dvd.
 
2) what is the partition scheme that you are allocating.
 
I can give you a Layman's tip that i use. (I know some ppl will not agree to this, so think before u do it.)This is to be used after it is sure that the installation material is fine.
 
Delete all the partitions on the hard drive. Also delete the partition tables. delete everything. See if u can use the DEBUG script. It really helps.
 
Once done,
Put the windows xp cd. Creat the number of partitions u want for windows. Make it NTFS?FAT32 as per your liking. DO NOT CREATE A PARTITION FOR LINUX. Just let that 56 MB be BLANK scpace (unpartitioned space)
 
After this install ur windows xp (No perepherals connected like printers and cameras)
Once u are done with windows,
 
Put in the fedora cd. Move on with the options. Select MANUAL partitioning.
 
Here give the windows drive a mount point (anything u like). I use /win_c, /win_d
 
Now add new partition. Make /,/home,/boot and <swap>
Partitions. (i recomment)
?boot will require a 120 mb space. Partition type should be ext3., <swap> will need GENERALLy twice the space as ur RAM. Now devide the remaining space between / and /home (all s/w will be installed in /, and all ur files and users will be in /home) I would say give 50% of remaining space to each.
 
Now carry on with the installation.
 
ADVICE : Install all the packages that u think u will be using in first attempt only.
Reason, When u want to reinstall some packaes from cd or dvd, you will face some problems. We will discuss that later.
 
I am sure You will be successful in installing FC5. Note that FC4 had some issues with SATA drives, but FC5 is just fine.
 
Now A problem that you will face and i am facing now:
 
Once u have installed both the os, U will not be able to reinstall windows XP by booting from the cd untill u delete alll ur partition and partition tables.
Well, i am sure once u find fedora comfortable, u will not be using windows , so it ok
 
Let Me know if it Helps!
Regards
Mohit

Well...I abandoned the attempt to install dual boot on one rive and decided to go two disks. I installed XP on one disk alone and then removed it and installed FC5 on another disk. They both work well as single boot drives, so I thought I would do what danleff recommended and try making the XP the maser, the FC5 disk the slave, and putting grub on the XP disk. Using the prescribed chroot method from rescue and then the grub install, I got the following return.
 
/dev/hdb1 does not have any corresponding BIOS drive.
 
Upon reboot, I get XP only. Is this due to my somewhat unorthadox approach to seperate installs on seperate solitary disks? Or was it successful and I'm ust not seeing the boot menu for some reason?
 
 

More helpful information...I entered into root via chroot again, this time to display fdisk -l. Here are the results:
 
Disk /dev/hda: 203.9GB, 203928109056 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24792 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
 
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 24791 199133676 7 HPPS/NTFS
 
Disk /dev/hb: 163.9 GB, 163928672 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19929 cyliners
Units=cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
 
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id
/dev/hdb1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/hdb2 14 19929 159975270 8e Linux LVM
 
Thinking I was clever, I edited the grub.conf file, but after looking at this output of fdisk, I think I edited it wrong. SHould I point to the hda1 rather than hda, since that is where fdisk is indicating the boot via *? Currently my grub is "boot=/dev/hda. I changed timeout to 30 and commented out hiddenmenu.
 
 
 
 

Quote:I installed XP on one disk alone and then removed it and installed FC5 on another disk.

This is a mistake. There is no need to remove drives. What you did in effect, is to remove the XP drive, so that when Grub was installed it has no bios mapping in Grub for the XP drive. Fedora thought that you were installing on a single drive, which you were. It does not know about the XP drive.

You should have installed Fedora with the XP drive in the system, as you would normally have it.

Now, with both drives in the system, the XP drive as the master and the Fedora as the slave, try getting into linux rescue, chroot into the Fedora root partition (hdb2) and run;

grub-install --recheck /dev/hda

Thanks Danleff....I realize removing a drive was not the way to do it, but the XP system was bombing out, I got frustrated and wanted to install Linux. Afterwards, I went and bought another harddrive and installed XP on it, so thats what happened.
 
Anywho, being a newbie, I have played with chroot once and that was via "chroot /mnt/sysimage".
 
When you say chroot to the hdb2 drive would you be so kind as to give me exact syntax?

Sorry for not being exact. Boot the installation cd. At the installation menu, type in linux rescue and hit the enter key.
 
Once Fedora goes through the initial setup of the system, you should get a menu with the choices of partitions to mount on sysimage. Pick the correct one, in your case, it should be /dev/hdb2.
 
When you get to a command line, type in;
 
chroot /mnt/sysimage
 
Then try the grub-install --recheck /dev/hda command.

Thank you God! (and danleff..grin). After a week (almost) I now have a working dual boot machine. I had to go in and edit the grub.conf file to change the root for fedora to (1,0) It was (0,0), and then no more error 22 or error 17!
 
My apologies to the forum for changing topic and staying in this thread, but thank you again...this is a SOLVED problem and I am about to begin enjoying FC5. WOOHOO!
 
John

Great! This thread got you thinking about the problem and to find a solution for your particular situation. So, Fedora allowed you to point to the slave drive w/o mapping the drive!
 
Good work!