i have bought a new pc, and a brand new sata 2 hard drive. I kept the old hard drive which had a previous installation of suse 9.2 on it, which dual booted with a seperate windows hard drive (which was sold with my old pc).

so now i want to scrap what is on the old drive, and put a different distribution on so it can dual boot with my new sata 2 ntfs drive.
So i went to download fedora core 4 and debian 3.1, burned them on a cd then made the choice.

when i tried installing fedora, after the keyboard/language selection screen, i recieved an error saying "hdd input/output error".
Not sure what to do about this i set about deleting the partitions on the old hard drive to give it a fresh start.

The second time i try to install fedora, it passes the language screen and lets me set the whole thing up, packages n all, but when it comes to actually install the system i get the same input/output error.
So then i tried to install debian, which again returns the input/output error when actually trying to write files to the disk.

i've no idea whats causing this or how to fix it so i can get one of these distros on (preferably fedora).
when i installed suse 9.2 using my old hardware, the installation was a breeze.
could it be the old data on the disk, my new hardware or something else?

my pc is amd64 3500, gigabyte GA-K8N nforce 4 ultra-9 motherboard
1 gig ram, sata 2 250gb hard drive for windows
80 gb maxtor ide hard drive for linux
radeon x800
please give me some guidance!
thanks

Sounds like your system is conflicting with the two hard drives. Are they jumpered/cabled properly?

ok, i swapped the ide cables of the dvd drive and the 80gb second hard drive.
This seemed to work and it installed fedora 4 perfectly.
I Now have a fully working installation...... with one really annoying side effect:
when setting up the grub boot loader in the installation, it detected the windows installation on my sata drive and called it 'other'.
I renamed this to 'Windows xp64' and set windows as the defualt to load up. However when grub appears it lists both operating systems, and fedora boots ok, but windows fails to boot!
i shall post the error message shortly after i reboot and have a look......

after selecting windows xp (i have xp 64 installed) the following appears:

booting Windows xp 64

rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1



then the screen just hangs on this.
During the installation it listed the sata drive (windows installation) as sd1/sd5, and the ide drive as hd1/hd0.
is it looking in the wrong place for the windows installation?
i could really use your help to fix this problem
thanks

Post your /boot/grub/grub.conf file.

This is the grub configuration file:-

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
# root (hd0,0)
# kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
# initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hdb
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora Core 64 (2.6.11-1.1369_FC4)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4.img
title Windows XP 64
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1


This is the device map:-
# this device map was generated by anaconda
(fd0) /dev/fd0
(hd0) /dev/hdb
(hd1) /dev/sda

please help me boot the windows installation!

Try editing the following part in the way I have shown.


Try to see if it works.

unfortunatley that didn't work.... it appears with the extra makeactive line but just hangs like before.
any suggestions?

I have seen similar issues with Grub not being able to boot to Windows XP, when you have some updates installed on the Windows XP installation.


Try this to see if it works.

Replace the line

rootnoverify (hd1,0)

with

root (hd1,0)

i fixed the grub config file with the following and the dual boot setup works perfectly!!! it took some searching but found somethin in the end!
title Windows XP 64
map hd (0) (1)
map hd (1) (0)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1

actually it should have read:

title Windows XP 64
map hd (0) (1)
map hd (1) (0)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

>map hd (0) (1)
map hd (1) (0)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1




Good one.