This has been annoying the hell out of me for a couple of days now, it seems I am not alone with this problem, but I haven't found a solution or a workaround - yet.

When attempting to install Fedora 11 (x86_64), from the DVD, anaconda fails to detect my hard drive so can't get past the partitioning options screen. I have also tried the following options in various combinations...

pci=nomsi,nommconf

libata.dma=1
libata.dma=0

pnpacpi=off
acpi=off

But nothing is working. Using the last option, acpi=off, causes the text installer to boot very very slowly, and then crash as soon as it is loaded.

So I decided to install Fedora 10, and see if I could upgrade that to Fedora 11. I installed Fedora 10, updated everything using yum, rebooted, checked yum for any more updates then I used the preupgrade program. It downloaded all the packages, and rebooted into anaconda. As soon as anaconda loaded it complained it could not detect Fedora 10, because it could not detect the hard drive. This I find really hard to believe considering it is running from the ruddy hard drive!

So I tried using my Fedora 11 DVD to see if that would upgrade an existing install. It didn't even give me the option of upgrading, and seemed to try to do a fresh install, where it failed to detect the hard drive again.

From what I can understand this is because anaconda doesn't have the drivers for my hard drive controller, nVidia nForce 3 which I think uses "sata_nv".

Is it possible to upgrade from Fedora 10 to Fedora 11, or install Fedora 11, without using Anaconda? Seems loads of people are having various problems with Anaconda, which is quite suprising considering the Fedora 11 release was delayed for weeks.

My setup isn't anything extravagant. I am trying to install this on a PC I built about 6 years ago, its a Shuttle SN95G5 (v2) with a WD SATA Raptor (74GB), which uses the default partitioning options offered in the Fedora 10 installation. It has an AMD Athlon64 3200+ processor with 2GB of ram, so it will be a very capable machine until it simply stops working due to old age. Besides, I can't afford a new one and I will be buggered if I am buying another just to install Fedora 11.

Any suggestions other than buying a new computer or switching to ubuntu? I'm pretty disappointed because I waited anxiously for Fedora 11 to be released so I could try it out straight away - only for it not to install.

Have you tried the kernel option all-generic-ide ?

I have much the same problem once, not sure which SATA controller the sytem used - it was with FC6. It absolutely would not find the HDD, until I passed

all-generic-ide

to the install kernel...

I then had to pass that same option in the GRUB config file to the kernel on boot, otherwise it wouldn't "find" the HDD either.

Hope this helps...

Thanks for the reply but it doesn't work for me... god I swear I am cursed.

I have used this system to dual boot windows (xp64) and linux (centos/fedora/ubuntu) for years... but since I got a laptop last year I used that for linux and the desktop has been used for Windows.

I can't install Fedora 11, or upgrade to it.

I can install Fedora 10, but would rather have the latest version for obvious reasons. There are no issues with it, so I might just have to use it and accept I will not be able to install/upgrade to Fedora 12 either - so it will rapidly become unsupported.

I can install the latest Kubuntu, but the whole desktop lags - even with the desktop effects off. It behaves how windows does if you don't install the graphics card drivers, scrolling is laggy, mouse is laggy, start menu is laggy, desktop is laggy. Makes it unusable as a workstation.

I can install CentOS 5, but its not really cut out to be a workstation as everything needs installing from source, and there are very few packages in yum. My main gripe is that I can't install Filezilla or VLC without ending up in dependency hell.

I don't mind installing things from source or binaries, after all I prefer to install Apache and PHP from source, and MySQL from it's binaries. But when you are having to overwrite shared libraries for one program you just know it is going to break another program that accesses it... and the whole point of me using Linux in the first place is to make web development quicker (I dont have to upload files to another server to test). I must have wasted so many man hours just troubleshooting Linux.

Now I can't find my ruddy windows installation disk!

Hardly any wonder the majority of people use windows when Linux is such a ball breaker just to get things working, and its really annoying when there is no fix for problems that have been invented since the last release. It's even more annoying to experience all these fucking problems just because I am one of the unlucky ones that had hardware support dropped, or bugs introduced.

Rant over.

Rant away - you touch on quite a few points of my Linux experiences too.

Sure, it isn't for everyone - in my case, I (and my employer over here) simply do not have the finances to go the M$ way for web development. The thing is as well that mostly we have older hardware (so it almost invariably turns out to be excellently supported by recent Linux kernels / distros).

I don't think you are cursed, you might just have an incompatible motherboard chipset (not unknown, especially with laptops, which it seems are notorious for the low level of Linux support - mostly because they often use specialised hardware). Often, for many of these setups, there will NEVER be Linux drivers - because the manufacturers are OEM-agreemented out of any possibility of documenting their hardware EXCEPT to M$ engineers. Thus preventing anybody from finding out how their stuff works so a Linux driver can be written, making their hardware useless / unusable with anything except some kind of Windows.

This of course, suits Microsoft JUST fine.

But I agree, it does not make sense to spend a man-month trying to get Linux going, where you can just install Windows and get it over with - if you HAVE Windows, and can afford it. I've probably spent several man-months in the past getting my various Linux install events over with, but the payback in

- stability
- zero cost of ownership
- convenience
- reliability

has more than made up for the time invested. Your milage varies, but that's the beauty of it - if you cannot get Linux going, or you have simply ran out of time, or you just don't like it, you always have the option of using Windows... nothing wrong with that. Unlike M$, nobody will FORCE you to use "their" operating system...

As for Ubuntu, I have had much the same experience as you describe, laggy desktop, slow performance, etc. On that same system, Fedora performed perfectly... again, YMMV.

Regards,

Same here, I don't know your exacts, but my harddrives mount fine from fedora, just anaconda crashed on harddrive read. I can mount and install software manually from 11......
11 is buggy, try 10 or CentOS
personally don't need to be totally current, rather just have something that works.

This is a ANACANDA bug and not a kernel problem, try mounting your drives from the live cd, or installing gparted from the live enviroment. Your probably have no problems.

But yeah, 10 might work better for you. 11 doesn't even post on half of my systems. I read they recompiled or restructured repacked 90% of the core.

Your probably be able to install 12 or 13, I'm sure their aware of the problems in 11 and working on getting them out, you might want to look at CentOS, which is a duplicate of Redhat Enterprise Linux, which is based on Fedora 6. CentOS or RHEL has a longer support/release cycle and is more stable. Fedora is a clock work release every 6 month, similar to Ubuntu. The next verison of RHEL is probably going to be based on Fedora 10, I doubt it will be 11 may be 12 but 11 is very buggy, they don't even pretend its not on the official site.

IMO your just beta testing for Redhat when you run Fedora
(openSuse is redhat based, and a much more stable choose then Fedora)

I didn't realise OpenSUSE was based on Redhat. SUSE is one of the main distributions I have never used as the association with Novell made me unsure about its future.

I have used Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, Arch Linux, etc... but more recently I have stuck to CentOS on servers and Fedora on desktops, and am annoyed that I can't update Fedora.

I will give OpenSUSE a go!

openSuSe isn't as GNU friendly as some of the others, but as a desktop os its pretty sweet. If you liked Fedora and Ubuntu your probably love openSuSe, its repositories are about somewhere inbetween. It also comes with Flash and Mp3 support out of the box. I believe Novell pays a license fee for that. I've also read that Microsoft has stakes in OpenSuSe as well, and it probably explains why they've incorporated support from Active Directory out of the box. Its a nice selling point when your trying to convert Windows Workstations to Linux, openSuSe looks great on paper as a Windows Alternative. Might just take you a couple days to get use to the suse way of doing thing. It still feels alot like redhat, but its come along way since then. The official site has great documentation.

I realize this reply is probably coming fairly late, but I've been grappling with this problem at work for the past two days, and I stumbled upon this post. As I speak, I'm upgrading Fedora 11 from Fedora 10 by using the Fedora 10 install disk and passing repo=insert_your_ftp_or_http_site_here to the kernel. The installer doesn't seem to notice or care that FC11 packages are being installed rather than FC10...just use the Upgrade option when it asks if you want to upgrade to FC10.

Additionally, I want to briefly note that I'm doing this after having created a driver disk for the sata_nv kernel module for the FC11 kernel (2.6.29.4) and passing the dd option to the kernel for the FC11 install. (You can find instructions on how to do that with a simple google search) Interestingly, FC11 does see the hard disk if you switch to tty2 and mount it manually, but the problem seems to be with anaconda, which is why I used the above method. I also tried creating an anaconda upgrade using python files from the older anaconda version from FC10, but this didn't work out.

Hope this helps.

This thread was a HUGE help to me, I'm a complete linux newb, I know little to nothing about it and I had issues with v11 recognizing my hard drives as well. They are ata133 IDE drives running on an ASRock motherboard, core2duo cpu and a pci-express video card. A bit of an odd combination but it was a cheap way to upgrade to a dual core system without having to buy all new hardware. I actually had been running an AGP card in this same motherboard until about six months ago when I upgraded. I downloaded v10 and installed it just fine, triple booting between fedora 10, win xp and win7. Grew up on DOS, win3.1 and OS/2, I had red hat for a while but without the internet available back then I got a little frustrated with the lack of software support and this is the first time I've gone back! I can't wait to learn how to utilize this sucker, signed up for some web development courses and the apache server will be a big help in playing with programs in the future.

So basically, thanks for the thread! Sorry the original poster gave up, but it was certainly good information for someone who d/led three versions of fedora 11, (386, 64, dvds and live cd) and none of them worked. I was very much relieved when v10 saw my drives! I hope the installer on v12 is fixed but I've gone years without updating winxp and from what I read fedora versions are released every 6 months so to be just 6 months behind is hardly anything I will worry about!

No it is not. Fedora 12 is having the exact same problem as Fedora 11, that's why it doesn't install or upgrade correctly. It's a Linux video driver problem that has been mentioned before on other Linux forums, but no one seems to bother in answering the issue. If anyone has a solution to this problem it would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

Did F12 install or was that not successful?

Every time I tried to install it went to a blank screen and froze. There is either something wrong with the new installer or it's the video driver problem as is with F11. However F11 did install when I used the direct i386 installer using 'Basic Video,' but when it finished it froze at the end of the installation.

I wanted to try F12 to see if they fixed the problem, but I can't even get the installer to work and it's an Alpha. That's why I originally went with F11. Plus I'm having a real hard time finding the right Linux video drivers for ATI Radeon 3870. As much fun Linux is, it's a nightmare trying to find the right drivers.