[dkuber]

howdy folks, newcomer here.

i am trying to build a computer for my son. used an old HP Pavilion box with Celeron processor. 256 MB RAM. put in a used Maxtor 40 GB ATA/133 HDD. i THOUGHT i had the jumper on the correct setting.

i did not take time to enter BIOS to see if it detected the HD before installing Fedora Core 4. it seems now that was a big mistake.

i've never used Linux before, got this install from a friend, so i called him for help several times throughout the installation process.

during partitioning, it detected /hdb ... my friend wondered why it wasn't detecting /hda instead, but we went on with the configuration. we set a SWAP drive of 256 KB and a TMP drive of 256 KB, then 38 GB at / and left about 350 KB free.

after going through the 2 installation CDs, it prompted me to remove media and reboot, which i did. now, it says "Operating System Not Found". i've tried moving the jumpers around to different settings, with no success.

i'm stumped and so is my friend. any ideas?

thanks in advance for your help. i'm looking forward to learning from y'all!

[foo]

Something is screwed up, either boot record or the partition table. Did you set the disk as 'primary' while installing Linux? Next time to install allocate atleast 256MB to Swap. TMP is /tmp or something else?

There must be some instructions on the top of the hard disk about jumper settings usually it's extreme left next to pci bus.

[saikee]

I would say that is a classic case a user having no idea where he/she has put the operating system and has no clue to how many partitions or disks in the system.

The error is most likely due to installing a boot loader into a 2nd boot disk ( or after installing it in the 1st disk and then reverse the disk order). Whe the first boot disk is booted it could not find an operating system.

To stop such nonsense one must

(1) Freeze the disk order.
(2) Use a Live CD to boot up the system and learn the disks and partitions information by the command
[code]fdisk -l{/code]
(3) Have one partition about 5Gb created by cfdisk program of the LiveCD, type 83 for native Linux and another 1Gb partition type 82 for swap.
(4) Boot up FC4 installation disk and instruct its installer to install into the nominated 5Gb partition. FC4 will know what to do with the swap.
(5) Instruct FC4 installer to put the boot loader into MBR (MBR always refer the first 512 bytes of the 1st bootable disk.

[rob.rice]

are the hard drives cable select on your mobo check at the mobos OEM web page
is the error "OS not found " BIOS kernel or bootloader? ( I have never seen this error )
I think the BIOS error would be "no boot device found "
if its a kernel error check what device is the boot loader is configured to use as "/ " or root
(not superuser root's home but the root of the file system )
you could also check the "/etc/fstab" file for what it has for /