Fedora 6 installation, feeling desperate

[katatonia]

Hi to all, i'm having trouble installing Fedora 6 from DVD. I did post this somewhere but now that i realized there's a newbies forum i'll put it here if that's ok.

Since i didn't know which distro to use, my friend gave me ubuntu 6.0.6, used it a little (live) then decided to install, everything went perfectly. The i was told to try Fedora out, so a friend gave me a copy of FC5, that's when the problems began.

The installation succeeded but when trying to log in, i get this error message telling me my session only lasted less than 10 seconds and to see if maybe i had a bad disk or a partition problem, then when i click to view the error details it shows at the end something like "...error loading libraries, not found"...it seems as though i messed up when partitioning. I did try to follow the steps i'd received (running 'linux restore'dd if=/dev/zero if=/dev/hda bs=521 count=1) and typing but every time i'd do it it would take me to the installation process all over again. Then what i thought was since I was able to get into the Failsafe terminal session, to see if i could run that command from there but i get this error stating i don't have permission or access denied, like if i wasn't the administrator....something is definitely wrong and now i'm locked up and unable to reformat my hd from scratch.

Here is the exact error i received:

Your session only lasted less than 10 seconds. If you have not logged at yourself, this
could mean that there is some installation problem or that you may be out of disk space.
Try logging with one of the failsafe sessions to see if you can fix this problem.


View details (~/.Xsession-errors file)

/etc/gdm/Presession/Default: Registering your session with wtmp and utmp

/etc/gdm/Presession/Default: running: /usr/bin/sersreg -a -w /var/log/wtmp -u /var/run/utmp -x "/var/gdm/: 0-Xservers " -h " " -1 ": 0 " "Leandro" > (my username)

/usr/bin/gnome-session: error while loading shared libraries: librerd.so.D: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I hope that by installing and re-installing and with unsuccessful attempts to re-format my hard drive it won't be usable again. So far my computer is running ok with ubuntu, which i don't like, and still when i go to edit partitions i see 2, not one.

If it helps my set up is:

120 gb SATA
Nvidia Gforce MX 4000
512 RAM
Logitech mouse G5

What can i do? , please help me, thanks in advance for reading.

Background:

Since i have the feeling i messed up while partitioning, then i'd like to mention a few things which might have led me to where i am. I used partition magic 7 and i followed the instructions of merging the partition into the main one (with windows in it) and it all seemed to have gone well, then what i noticed before trying to install fedora and ubuntu that when i'd try getting to the new folder containing the information on the 2nd partition, it would state "access denied" and when hovering over the folder it'd state "this folder is empty"

[tech_man]

I used partition magic 7.

Use GParted.

[Oxygen]

Can you not partition it with the Fedora Core installer?

[tech_man]

Can you not partition it with the Fedora Core installer?

You can, but I have had them mess up when shrinking partitions sometimes.

[devils casper]

You can, but I have had them mess up when shrinking partitions sometimes.

i agree. Partition Manager of Fedora Installer is a bit Buggy and i have never suggested anyone to use that. GParted is Best.





Casper

[katatonia]

Thanks all for helping me. I finally got it solved, it was just a matter of re-downloading the image and reinstalling, everything went well. Thanks again.

[jens]

You can, but I have had them mess up when shrinking partitions sometimes.

i agree. Partition Manager of Fedora Installer is a bit Buggy and i have never suggested anyone to use that. GParted is Best.

Casper

The RH/Fedora installer(Anaconda) actually uses (g)parted as well... (so their's nothing more buggy about it)
The main problem with parted was kernel related and had nothing to do with Anaconda (as far as I know, this only used to be a problem for Windows users).

Just use good old fdisk (or the installer if you want parted).

[tech_man]

Fedora actually uses (g)parted as well...

I could have sworn that FC6 and RedHat, for that matter, all use Disk Druid.

[jens]

I could have sworn that FC6 and RedHat, for that matter, all use Disk Druid.

Indeed.
Disk Druid is mostly just parted with a Redhat anaconda GUI(only meant for your installation).
Plain parted can/could be used in anaconda as well (since that's what Disk Druid uses for the actual partitioning).
That also means that the drive-size bug in Disk Druid was the same as with parted, using GParted over Disk Druid would not have made a difference.

Fdisk is IMHO still more stable.