These Dell's have an Intell motherboard chipset, which seems to be giving FC4 fits. These Dells are designed to work with XP exclusively.
 
There are a lot of posts about Dell systems on this forum and elsewhere. I would not install any distro of Linux on the same hard drive as the pre-installed XP one. Dell often puts a hidden recovery partition on the beginning of the hard drive. This often causes problems.
 
You errors suggests a kernel panic?? which means that grub is looking for the kernel on the wrong partition.
 
It looks like you have been able to get in FC4 to install grub to the MBR, probably via rescue mode from the cd?
 
Get into FC4 and type the following at a console as root user;
 
df -h (hit the enter key)
 
Post what comes back as the root filesystem, usually the first entry that shows the root marker /.
 
If possible, get into the /boot/grub/menu.lst file and post where grub is pointing to the kernel to boot. You will see an entry like;
 
kernel (hd0,1) /boot/vmlinuz........
 
or an entry after the title;
 
root (hd0,1)
 
Post what either states for the bolded area that I noted.
 
Good thing that XP still works. I hope that you have your recovery cds?

Thanks for the reply. Please see below.
 
 
Originally posted by danleff:

Quote: ....It looks like you have been able to get in FC4 to install grub to the MBR, probably via rescue mode from the cd?
 
yes. 'linux rescue noprobe' command.
 

Quote:Get into FC4 and type the following at a console as root user;
 
df -h (hit the enter key)
 
Post what comes back as the root filesystem, usually the first entry that shows the root marker /.
 

 
Filesystem...........Size ..........Mounted as
/dev/hda5.........5.7G............../
/dev/hda3............479M........../boot
/dev/hda6............2.0G......../mnt/transfer
 
 
The last one is FAT system. Also there are three more (from
fdisk -l command output) : hda1 - Dell Utility; hda2 - NTFS and hda7 - Linux Swap/Soalris
 
 

Quote:If possible, get into the /boot/grub/menu.lst file and post where grub is pointing to the kernel to boot. You will see an entry like;
 
kernel (hd0,1) /boot/vmlinuz........
or an entry after the title;
root (hd0,1)

 
Here is the excerpt...
 
root (hd0,2)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 ro root =LABEL=/
hda=58168,16,63 rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.11-1.1269_FC4.img
 
title Win XP
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1
 
 

Quote:Good thing that XP still works. I hope that you have your recovery cds? 
Yah. (thank God)
 
Need to mention one more thing, I tried Solaris first, which did not work out. Now, the fdisk command shows the swap partition as
hda7 - Linx Swap/Solaris. I remember formatting as ext3 during installation. Hope nothing wrong here.
 
 

If you know how to edit Grub when the grub menu pops up (booting from the hard drive), change
 
root (hd0,2) to
 
root (hd0,4)
 
See if that works.
 
If this gets you in can edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file directly using Konqueror in superuser mode, to make the changes stick.
 
Let us know if you don't know how to edit grub at the menu. Each distro does it somewhat differently, but basically when you get to the grub menu, try hitting the "e" key, highlight the root line, hit "e" again, then use the left arrow key until you get to the part to edit. Make the change and hit the <enter> key. Then hit the "b" key to boot with the changes.
 
If hitting the "e" key does not give you the raw menu, hit the <esc> key, yes to text mode, then "e"....and so on.
 
If this works, remember that you need to edit the file menu.lst directly to make it stick.

Thanks again.
 
No, it did not work
 
I get
 
Error message 15: File not found
Press any key to continue
 
 
By any chance could it be the network configuration, the last line
where it halts says 'network' (as shown in the first post).
 
 

I should have read your posts more carefully. You have a boot partition on hda2, so this is fine, sorry. I never use a boot partition, so this is a source of my own confusion. So, the root (hd0,2) line is correct, pointing to the hda3 boot partition.
 
Your absolutely correct. By using linmux noprobe during the installation, you disable probing hardware, such as your network.
 

Quote:linux noprobe Disables hardware probing for all devices, including network cards (NICs), graphics cards, and the monitor. Forces you to select devices from a list. You must know exactly which cards or chips the system uses when you use this command. Use when probing causes the installation to hang or otherwise fail. This command allows you to give arguments for each device driver you specify.. 
Taken from this site.
 
Hence, the probable source of the problem. Fedora is hanging on hardware that you specified (or did not) during the installation.
 
The problem with this type of installation, is that you need to know exactly what chipsets are in your NIC card (and other hardware) that you can set later.
 
In some of these cases, you can hit <ctrl> <c> and let the boot process continue.
 
But this issue here is Fedora does not like your machine.
 
I can think of a few exotic answers, but I am not sure that you want to do this.
 
What I suggest is to try the newest version of Mepis on live cd and see what it does. If it works, then you can install it on the hda5 partiion.
 
As a last ditch effort, you can try this. At the grub screen, go once again to the edit mode and the kernel line. At the end of the kernel line type in;
 
noapic
 
Make sure that there is a space betwen the last entry already there and inserting this code. Hit the enter key, then "b" for boot and see what happens.
 
 

No man, noapic did not work.
 
I tried to install it again, without 'noprobe' it's not possible (played with the other options, 'nousb', 'noparport', 'skipdde').
With 'noprobe', if I select the Broadcom 4400 driver (that's my NIC driver) from the lists it will halt. The scenario is like this, to get the installation done I have to select 'noprobe' and have to skip adding the drivers. Then after installation it wont boot as it can't detect/configure the network
 
I installed MEPIS live cd. It's working without any trouble.
Actually, I am posting this from MEPIS. I am impressed with this one. However, it looks like I have to pay to get
a harddisk installation done with root access.
 
Thanks for your helps throughout. I am not sure what to do with Fedora. Spent like one whole week on this.
 

Quote:Actually, I am posting this from MEPIS. I am impressed with this one. However, it looks like I have to pay to get
a harddisk installation done with root access.

No, you don't have to buy it to install it on the hard drive.

If you are signed on as demo user and pick the "install me" icon, the install will prompt you for a password. The password is root. The installation should then continue without incident

So, Fedora does not like the system configuration of the Dell. At this point, I don'r know what else to suggest.

The only other remote possibility is that the iso files did not completely burn properly and the hardware is not the issue, rather the disks, which caued some files not to be written correclty to the hard drive and gave you the fits during the install. Telling Frdora to ignore the hardware bypassed the problem. At least for the installation.

What speed did you burn your iso disks at? ISO images need to be burned at 4X or 8X, no fater.

Thanks.
 
Tried to install Mepis to the harddrive. I lost my boot to Windows option because of this. Have to reinstall Fedora, to get the Windows boot option back.
 
Also, Mepis itslef did not boot from harddisk. But, I did not pay much attention to that, and did the installation without much prepartion. Will get back to this later.
 
I actually forgot at what speed I burned them. But I am pretty sure it's more than 4x/8x. I mean it took only few minutes to get them burned (I love the NEC 3520). I skipped the media checkduring the installation, will do that next time. Good to know the burn speed issue of iso files.
 

Ok. Removed Fedora completely.
 
Got Mepis working from harddisk. GRUB did not recognize Windows in the first install, did so in the second install though. Don't know what was wrong first time.
 
Thanks for your time.