[Preston] Re: Installing Fedora Core 1

[(BPD) Martyn Ashworth]

Hello Granville,

Apart from the obligatory advice of scrapping windows and just running 
Linux here's my 10 pence worth.

Not sure if you are suggesting the install fails during the installation 
of RPMS, diring post-installation or between the two but as long as some 
of the RPMS are being installed at least we can assume it is using the 
file system ok.

I would boot off the fedora CD 1 and take the recovery option (this used 
to be "linux rescue" at the boot prompt, RH 7 days)

As you know the device you have installed linux under you can simply use 
"mount /dev/hda7 /mnt/image" and this should give you access to the root 
file system under said directory. From there check out /root/install.log 
and /root/install.log.syslog to see if you can get any clues as to 
failing point. Also check any files in /var/log as they may hold 
clues..... if any exist!

p.s. if you don't want to keep typing cd /mnt/image/dir1/ etc.. just 
"chroot /mnt/image" to make that your root mount point.

install.log is a simple list of RPMS installed, followed by a list of 
RPMS ignored, but if it was failing during that part of the install this 
may help diagnose a possible problem.

install.log.syslog is a kind of "extra task" install log, groups 
created, users created, sound card detection etc, and may be of more use 
if it is failing post RPM stage.

otherwise i'm at a loss without more information. Another possibility is 
that the BIOS has the option to stop boot records being written (my 
technical wording hereis attrocious, but i hope you know what i mean). 
Sometimes called a BIOS virus protection. This would hang the install as 
it cannot write the MBR but i would *hope* that RedHat (Fedora) would 
have written a graceful fail message into the install process for that 
problem.

As a side note, should you be unaware of the device you are seeking, 
then simply create a /dev entry using mknod (so "mknod /dev/hda") and 
then fdisk -l ( "fdisk -l /dev/hda" ) gives you partition information. 
(remember, the recovery option used by redhat DOES NOT populate the /dev 
folder which much by default, this is a minimal system)

Good Luck!
Martyn S. Ashworth

Sorry about the long post. Hope it helps someone, if not you ;)