I had a problem installing a latest Fedora 9 i386 on some old Compaq Evo (Intel 845 motherboard). The installer does not see any HDD on my system. And the hard disk (WD800, 80Gb Western Digital IDE) is present and visible in BIOS and in DOS (fdisk is working).
The solution and the problem were very stupid. The HDD was not jumpered properly. It was a single drive, but jumpered as “Master w/ Slave”. The valid jumper position is “Single”.
At first, I spend more than an hour trying various kernel configuration options. But after changing this jumper, it worked like a charm.
I had the exact same problem with Fedora 7, 8 and now Fedora 9. No disk found. I looked and yes, I had an 80GB WD drive and the jumper was set to Master w/slave. Reset to single and no it looks ok. Thanks. I have spent many hours of searching and rebooting, reconfiguring and attempting to get around this.
Must be a flag that gets left in the bios when it can’t find the slave drive.
I have Evo too and I have a older 40 Maxtor which only shows d50 jumper master/single or off as slave. Pulled jumper and it works.
Same problem with my Western Digital 160 GB drive when installing Fedora 9. I ended up going crazy backing up my FC5 installation crashing it and even deleting the partition with gparted in puppy OS. After that didn’t work I googled the right combo of phrases to get here. Thanks for the info. And also thanks to Walmart and their cheap clearance WD hard drives, Should’ve bought a Samsung.