Fedora 7 hung during installation on IBM Thinkpad A30

[1moretime]

Hi, I am a total newbie to Linux. Have successfully loaded Fedora 7 on desktop no problem, so DVD is good.
Loading on Thinkpad (Plll - 1.13Ghz 384MB memory 30GB HDD ATI mobility) all went smoothly till 75% done, then loading just stopped. Tried to load again, regular and rescue, hangs when searching for Fedora Installations but I can get command line. Other distros (openSUSE and Mandriva) will not boot from DVD and Win 98 and XP say errors on Hard Drive do not allow formatting. Spotmau Powersuite sees 3 'sections' - unallocated, Linux and Linux LVM, but unable to format/reformat. Would like to be able to successfully load Fedora 7 or failing that, load other Linux distro on reformatted HDD. Any help to get out of this loop would be greatly appreciated.

[stoat]

Hello 1moretime,

I can't really know what is wrong, but here is at least something to consider. It is possible for a DVD to have good data but be of low quality optically such that it works in some but not all drives. See what I mean? It's happened before. You can read an example of this in another thread here (http://forum.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=189020). So, if nobody else gives you any better ideas, maybe you should try something (anything) different regarding the burning of the DVD. I recommend using a known high quality (not necessarily well-known to the average person) brand of DVD. They're not all the same, you know. For example, a famous brand that I used and is available everywhere in department stores was actually being manufactured by Ritek two years ago, Prodisk Technology last year, and CMC Magnetics now. The difference in quality can be measured. I did it.

Another thing that you can try right this minute is a network install (http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f7/en_US/sn-install-tcpip-config.html). Download the ISO (boot.iso) to make a Fedora 7 (or 8 or 9) minimal boot CD. Look up a known good FTP or HTTP site URL (start with the Fedora server, then try mirrors, search here for threads with examples and how to do it). Boot with the CD while connected to the Internet via a wire cable to a NIC. Choose the FTP or HTTP method of installation. There's at least a chance that it may work tonight. Network installs take longer than a DVD install. But it's an option, and you save the time of downloading the entire DVD again.

Finally (for now), if you still have the ISO file that you used to make your first DVD, then somehow get it onto a little FAT32 partition at the far back end of the Thinkpad's drive. Then do the Hard Drive alternative installation method (http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f7/en_US/sn-installing-from-harddrive.html). You can boot with that same minimal boot CD for this, too. Choose "Hard Drive" as the installation method.

Just some ideas. Trying to help.

P.S.: About that reformatting/repartitioning problem, try the newest version of the GParted LiveCD (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php). It should be able to perform actions (i.e., delete) now on the LVM PV that you have there. I haven't tried it myself (I don't use LVM), but I heard here that the newest version has LVM support. Other ideas are fdisk with a LiveCD such as a Fedora LiveCD or Knoppix. All are good tools to have handy for times like this. Anyway, somehow get rid of the Linux partitions from the botched installation, and your XP CD will probably boot up again. Or start over with Fedora. Or something.

[JohnVV]

on your specs you might want to look at dan's post here
http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=191184
but if you want to give fedora a try
fedora 7 is past " end of life"
so burn fedora 8 live cd
ftp://ftp.uci.edu/mirrors/fedora/linux/releases/8/Live
http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/ Fedora-8-Live-i686.torrent
and SystemRescueCd
http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page
SystemRescue has gparted on it .Run it and reformat to 1 one partition of type ext3
then give the live cd a go

[ozjd]

A couple of points for you to consider, Fedora 7 is old and very soon, if not already, updates will no longer be available. F9 was recently released and F8 has been around for 6 months and so is stable. You will find it easier to get help on the current versions.

I am a bit concerned when the hard drive gets errors. Windows won't be able to access the Linux partitions but should be able to format over them.

A site I found useful when I had a Thinkpad was thinkwiki.org.


EDIT: I see John got in before me :D

[1moretime]

Thanks for your replies. My problem continues to be access to the hard drive partitions. It doesn't matter what partitioning software I use, they identify 3 partitions but are unable to reformat, wipe or change them in anyway. The same thing appears to be the case through the terminal. As this is a preowned laptop (government), I am unable to verify if the hard drive worked fine with the previous o/s as the o/s had already been removed. Maybe, I will settle with replacing the hard drive and try another installation.

[scvo.0ne]

Before replacing harddrive you should go in the bios and check if a harddrive password was enabled.

[JohnVV]

"It doesn't matter what partitioning software I use, they identify 3 partitions but are unable to reformat, wipe or change them in anyway."
that is odd ,I've never came across that
but
"As this is a preowned laptop (government)"
give Google a try for " drive-lock " and " HDD password "
i came across a LOT of listings
and an old slashdot.com " /. " post
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/09/2054235

[1moretime]

An update to bring closure to this topic.
The passwords were disabled in the BIOS and so yesterday I installed a different hard drive. Using the same bootable DVD with Fedora 7, the loading went perfectly. One happy computer and one happy user.( I will try loading Fedora 8 soon).
The suggestion that the original hard drive had a 'manufacturers' lock in place, or something similar, would appear to be true. Thanks for the help and for pointing me in the right direction for some interesting reading at the various links you have all suggested.