No suitable drive error

[jashar]

I have cobbled together a machine for my kids last weekend and was tring to install FC5, but much to my chagrin it failed. I kept getting an error saying no suitable drive; yet I saw it discover it on boot. Any suggestions?

I have made sure the jumper was a primary master on the IDE chain. I removed other devices to make sure that wasn't the problem. The drive does work, I checked it.

[b_martinez]

Please post the specifications of this 'cobbled' box.
Bill

[jashar]

Sure, here is what I have:
Asus A7 motherboard, 1.5GHZ Athalon with 768MB RAM, 1 60GB IBM IDE HDD, ATI All in Wonder 128, 1 52X CD, 1 CD-RW. Both CDs are on the secondary IDE chain. The HDD is on the primary. I have another WD 30GB HDD that I have tried to use as well, but it did not work either.

The motherboard, CPU, RAM and the CD-RW were left from the original machine that did have Fedora on it, so I know they work. The HDD was in another device not to long ago and has been formated to Fat32 (which I planned on reformatting when I got to that step).

Any ideas?

[b_martinez]

Yes. First , my apologies for not responding sooner.
Try to move the CD-RW to the second IDE controller, as slave. Make the second HDD the slave drive onthe primary IDE controller. Set the bios to detect the second hdd. easiest way to do that is to make the primary slave and secondary master read "AUTO" in all the settings.
D/L and burn a copy of euther Knoppix or System Rescue CD. (I've never used the second of these, but heard good things about it.) Use that to partition/format the second disk.
I"ll be on and off the computer till 9:00pm mountain time tonight , and will keep an eye out for your posts.
The above always assumes that you have checked/replaced the hdd ribbon to ensure that one of the teensy little wires in it has not broken. And also that you have another ribbon for the second IDE controller.
Good Luck
Bill

[jashar]

Thanks for the info. I will give it a try.