Fedora 12 install trashed boot sector of hard rive

[Jeff Kittle]

Actually it’s a brand spanking new Seagate 1.5 TB drive.

I just built the system, it's an AMD Phenom 2 with 8GB of DDR3. I downloaded Gparted Live CD , but that came
Back with a disk error. I downloaded a package called systemrescuecd and booted the resulting CD image. This
Allowed me to run parted and create one partion as a primary. Then I tried the Fedora 12 x86_64 install
Again and lo and behold, the thing is actually installed.

Sometimes you got to love when things just work right.

-----Original Message-----
From: users-bounces at lists.fedoraproject.org [mailto:users-bounces at lists.fedoraproject.org] On Behalf Of Sam Varshavchik
Sent: Sunday, April 04, 2010 5:53 PM
To: Community support for Fedora users
Subject: Re: Fedora 12 install trashed boot sector of hard rive

Jeff Kittle writes:

> Hi
> 
> Trying to install Fedora 12 x86_64 and the disk partition tool hung. 
> Had to power down machine. Now when I try to install, it always goes
> 
> To the basic text type of install and tells me I have no hard drive 
> defined.
> 
> I need some answers please

Most likely you had a hard drive on its last legs, and the install attempt tipped it over the edge into brickdom. This is not unusual.

Start the installer, get as far as you can, then flip over to one of the alt
terminals: ALT-F1, ALT-F2, ALT-F3, etc… Or, I think the magic keystroke may be CTRL-ALT-Fn rather than ALT-Fn, I don't recall. Anyway, one of them should be a root shell. You can poke around and look for a log file, then look at the logged error messages, for more clues. If you're lucky, one of the other alt screens will still show the kernel whining about the dead hard drive.

That will basically confirm that your hardware is dead. If not, the diagnostic messages would provide additional info why your hardware is not getting detected.