recover from a bad F16 install

[R. G. Newbury]

> I have an install DVD that I used to do a fresh install of F16 onto a
> i386/686 machine. I then used it to do a fresh install of a second
> machine. Midway through the formatting/partitioning, it "popped up a
> bug". When I reported it, it pointed me to 743778 which was closed as
> "notabug". At that point, the machine was at some unknown state in its
> formatting.
>
> I now have a machine that is "a brick". There is no operating system on
> it as that got destroyed and any attempts to do a fresh install come
> back with "No usable disks have been found" and I can't make any
> progress. Nothing could be done in the troubleshoot options except get a
> dmesg, which I have attached to this email.
>
> Is this one of these times where I need to get something like
> partedmagic and figure out how to format/partition from there? If so,
> anyone done this before and can give pointers. If not, what other
> options do I have.


You need to visit www.sysresccd.org  and download the iso. Burn to a CD 
or install unto a USB drive (instructions on the website). It has all of 
the nice tools you need and runs as a 'live-cd' to allow you to fix things.

Note that if you got to the partitioning portion of the Fedora16 
install, and let anaconda set the partitioning, then it is now using gpt 
and not the usual mbr scheme. Recovery back to an ms-dos style mbr is 
not difficult but takes a number of steps.

G.