recover from a bad F16 install

[Paul Allen Newell]

On 3/17/2012 8:50 PM, Tim wrote:
> On Sat, 2012-03-17 at 18:40 -0700, Paul Allen Newell wrote:
>> 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.
> Is that at a stage where you're asked whether to use whole discs, free
> space on a disc, etc., or before that sort of question.
>
> I ask because people often get caught at this stage.  "Free space" is
> unpartitioned space on a drive, not an unused partition.
>
> If the problem is not that, or before then, chances are that you can
> CTRL+ALT+F (one of the function keys, try one until you get to a shell).
> Where you could run partitioning software from the command line.  If you
> simply want to make a whole disc blank for the install to use the whole
> thing, you could use something like fdisc to install an empty partition
> table to the drive.
>

Tim:

Thanks for reply.

It asks me for language, then keyboard, then whether I want a basic 
install or whatever the other option is. I select basic and it goes to 
"examine the system" (I can't remember the exact thing it says it 
examines) and that's when I get the "No usable disks".

As I can get to bash shell via the trouble shooting option, let me do 
some research on fdisc and see what's there

Paul