psychick_orgasm
20th April 2005, 06:00 PM
Problem: Installation process completed successfully without installing bootloader. Fedora wouldn't boot off HD, so I ran the install CD again, chose the 'update' option and proceeded to install Grub on the MBR. However, after going through a several minute install procedure, Anaconda comes back and tells me "No Kernel Packages Installed. Boot loader configuration was not changed." Or something to that effect.
A bit of background for thee curious: My adventures with Linux started a couple years ago. At the time I didn't accomplish much more than wiping out a hard drive in my attempts to get the hang of partitioning. I recently acquired one of the latest HP Media Center PCs - I can't tell you all the specs off the top of my head, but I know I'm running 2 pentium 4 processors, with an internal ATA drive. The PC is optimized for multimedia and comes with a decent set of applications, but I think its high-time I migrate to an open source solution for my multimedia creation and manipulation studio (ie my apartment)
I am trying to install Linux on an internal Western Digital 100G drive, mounted in an external box connected via USB. Windows recognizes the drive fine (or did...now that it is a Linux partition, XP won't see it) and I can choose to boot from it when I first start up the computer (this HP blue screen that pops up telling me F1 for the boot menu...I thought this was in the MBR of my primary drive, but now I'm wondering if it is [can be?] actually in the BIOS somehow...
Anyway, I've spent the past couple weeks trying literally every major Linux distro. I keep running into problems at various stages, usually when it comes to booting from the USB drive. So, with downloading and burning a bit easier than learnning the ins and outs of Linux programming, I keep re-formatting the drive and installing new distros over it, in hopes that one of them will be "smart" enough to just work without too much extra effort.
Well, this trial-and-error has proven to be too time consuming, and after all, the whole point of running Linux (well, one point anyway) was to brush up on those geek skills I started losing about the time dos gave way to win 3.1 , so now I've got four discs of Fedora sitting on my desk and I'm determined to make it work...I'm not downloading another distro dammit until I'm a Linux guru!
Thee Process: So, here is where I am at now. I installed Fedora three or four times last nite. I tried installing first without the boot loader, thinking I could just tell my original bootloader (the HP thingy, wherever that is...) to boot from the USB drive. Well, the system went to boot from the drive in question, where it apparently found some fragment of LILO I had installed awhile ago..which simply hangs up. So I decided that Lilo must have been stuck in the boot record of my USB drive - which baffled me since I had already reformatted that drive several times long since last using Lilo - and tried to run the Fedora install disc again to re-install Grub. This is when I received the "no kernel packages installed." error. So when I boot, it still does the Lilo thing.... (unless I boot to CD or internal HD, either of which is no prob, but not what I want...)
I decided to simply do a fresh install of Fedora, this time including the Grub install (rather than come back to do it later.) Install seemed to go fine, no warnings or whatever, but once again the damn Lilo thing happens... so then on a whim I decided to see what the System Restore option on my computer's original boot menu did ... this was a long process which re-installed all the apps and settings on my XP drive, thankfully without losing any of my files on there. To my surprise, this actually accomplished something for my Linux experiment...when I tried to boot to the USB drive, instead of loading LILO, it tries to load Grub. But after the text "Grub" appears in the upper left screen, it just sorta locks up. So I'm wondering if Lilo was actually in the MBR, which was reset by my system restore thing...though Lilo never came up unless I specified to boot from the external CD. Anyway, I decided I might as well try installing Grub to my MBR (I had been trying to install it to the first partition of my USB drive, since I want to leave my WinXP drive basically untouched)....so I select this option when I run the CD update again, but it comes back again with the "No kernel found."
Now remember that I have run through the installation process several times. Last time I selected to install "Everything", so the kernel pretty much must have been installed. Only I don't know what the filename is or where to look for it. I've tried looking at Grub.Conf but either it opens up as a blank file or I get an error "file exists but cannot be read" (or something to that effect.)
I'm tempted to try running the whole install process over again, but I don't know if I'm just wasting my time running in circles...any suggestions?
PS ... My internal WinXP drive is /dev/sda . My USB Fedora drive is /dev/sdb. I chose the automatic partitioning option, so I've got a primary boot partition and then two logical volumes on /sdb.
A bit of background for thee curious: My adventures with Linux started a couple years ago. At the time I didn't accomplish much more than wiping out a hard drive in my attempts to get the hang of partitioning. I recently acquired one of the latest HP Media Center PCs - I can't tell you all the specs off the top of my head, but I know I'm running 2 pentium 4 processors, with an internal ATA drive. The PC is optimized for multimedia and comes with a decent set of applications, but I think its high-time I migrate to an open source solution for my multimedia creation and manipulation studio (ie my apartment)
I am trying to install Linux on an internal Western Digital 100G drive, mounted in an external box connected via USB. Windows recognizes the drive fine (or did...now that it is a Linux partition, XP won't see it) and I can choose to boot from it when I first start up the computer (this HP blue screen that pops up telling me F1 for the boot menu...I thought this was in the MBR of my primary drive, but now I'm wondering if it is [can be?] actually in the BIOS somehow...
Anyway, I've spent the past couple weeks trying literally every major Linux distro. I keep running into problems at various stages, usually when it comes to booting from the USB drive. So, with downloading and burning a bit easier than learnning the ins and outs of Linux programming, I keep re-formatting the drive and installing new distros over it, in hopes that one of them will be "smart" enough to just work without too much extra effort.
Well, this trial-and-error has proven to be too time consuming, and after all, the whole point of running Linux (well, one point anyway) was to brush up on those geek skills I started losing about the time dos gave way to win 3.1 , so now I've got four discs of Fedora sitting on my desk and I'm determined to make it work...I'm not downloading another distro dammit until I'm a Linux guru!
Thee Process: So, here is where I am at now. I installed Fedora three or four times last nite. I tried installing first without the boot loader, thinking I could just tell my original bootloader (the HP thingy, wherever that is...) to boot from the USB drive. Well, the system went to boot from the drive in question, where it apparently found some fragment of LILO I had installed awhile ago..which simply hangs up. So I decided that Lilo must have been stuck in the boot record of my USB drive - which baffled me since I had already reformatted that drive several times long since last using Lilo - and tried to run the Fedora install disc again to re-install Grub. This is when I received the "no kernel packages installed." error. So when I boot, it still does the Lilo thing.... (unless I boot to CD or internal HD, either of which is no prob, but not what I want...)
I decided to simply do a fresh install of Fedora, this time including the Grub install (rather than come back to do it later.) Install seemed to go fine, no warnings or whatever, but once again the damn Lilo thing happens... so then on a whim I decided to see what the System Restore option on my computer's original boot menu did ... this was a long process which re-installed all the apps and settings on my XP drive, thankfully without losing any of my files on there. To my surprise, this actually accomplished something for my Linux experiment...when I tried to boot to the USB drive, instead of loading LILO, it tries to load Grub. But after the text "Grub" appears in the upper left screen, it just sorta locks up. So I'm wondering if Lilo was actually in the MBR, which was reset by my system restore thing...though Lilo never came up unless I specified to boot from the external CD. Anyway, I decided I might as well try installing Grub to my MBR (I had been trying to install it to the first partition of my USB drive, since I want to leave my WinXP drive basically untouched)....so I select this option when I run the CD update again, but it comes back again with the "No kernel found."
Now remember that I have run through the installation process several times. Last time I selected to install "Everything", so the kernel pretty much must have been installed. Only I don't know what the filename is or where to look for it. I've tried looking at Grub.Conf but either it opens up as a blank file or I get an error "file exists but cannot be read" (or something to that effect.)
I'm tempted to try running the whole install process over again, but I don't know if I'm just wasting my time running in circles...any suggestions?
PS ... My internal WinXP drive is /dev/sda . My USB Fedora drive is /dev/sdb. I chose the automatic partitioning option, so I've got a primary boot partition and then two logical volumes on /sdb.
