Fedora 3 Installation - please help

[eogman]

The problem - i am a beginner to Linux, my situtaion is that i am trying to send old computers to Africa to schools in Ethipia and Kenya through an Irish charity, since Microsoft gave me absolutely no help whatsoever i decided to load on Fedora 3 with Open Ofiice etc.

The problem is that i have to wipe all data on the disks using KILLDISK which writes over any info 3 times and erases all data on the hard drives, this is a must otherwise companies and institutions will not give over their computers to the charity, i have to send them a certificate of Data Destruction.

After Killdisk, i setup 1 partition using all available disk space using FDISK utility. When i try to load on the operating system Fedora 3, the error i get is 'This is not a valid Boot disk, please insert another disk'

I tested the DVD Fedora 3 Disk using Checksum and all went well.

My questions - Do i need to load a pre-operating Linux utility before Fedora 3 after i have wiped the hard drives?
- How do i load Fedora 3 from the DVD disk or CD-ROMs from a linux prompt if the ISO image does not automatically boot?
- Has anyone else used KILLDISK and found a problem similar to this?
- What is the proper procedure to take a completely empty harddrive up to a pre OS installation stage?

The charity is at www.camara.ie, i really need to get this problem sorted as soon as possible, any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance, Eogman.

[dylunio]

Firstly are you sure that the cd's are burnt correctly? (You might find this helpful: http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/topic-48038.html)

Secondly are you sure that the computers can boot cds? if not can you try booting a floppy like the one mentioned here.

I hope this is some help, since I don't think killdisk will have stoped you installing FC3 the normal way

[eogman]

The disks are A1, checksum perfect. Is there a better way to re-partition/ re-format a hard drive after it has been entirely wiped (US Department of Defense standards) other than using FDISK?

[dylunio]

you could just bootup the FC3 disks and use it's partitioning program to do the partitioning && formatting.