fedora; insufficient disk space error on installation

[j8500]

I am a first time user trying to install fedora. After I choose which options to install, it begins the installation process and stops with the following error: "insufficient disk space". Under details it says, "You need more space on the following file systems: 481 M on/

The computer is an AMD Athlon64 3400 with a ECS K8M890M-M motherboard 256 mg ram and WD 40 gig HD. It originally had Windows 2000 with NTFS file system. I selected "use entire disk" installation option for fedora. My first thought was to get rid of the NTFS. I saw no tool to reformat with ext3, so I formatted it with FAT32. I get the same error.

??? Help! ???

Thanks

[MikeTbob]

Hello and Welcome
You probably should re-install and this time just let the installer select the file system type (ext3), you shouldn't have to change it. You might have to manually delete the fat32 partition this time.

[j8500]

This first attempt was when it had Windows 2000 and NTFS. I did let fedora select the file system- actually, I did not see any option in fedora to select file system. I did see and select the "use entire drive" installation option. After I got the error I tried again with FAT32 from a Windows 98 disk and got the same error.

What would you recommend as a next step?

Thanks!

[MikeTbob]

Fire up the LiveCd and issue this command and post it back here.

fdisk -l

[j8500]

Excellent suggestion. This has proved that the file system is not the problem like I thought. Here is what I tried:

1. booting from the disk from the fedora DVD menu. I got a disk error.
2. downloading the desktop version of fedora's LiveCD and attempting to boot from the CD: loading errors, then a line began to load across the bottom of the screen, then restart into a black screen.
3. downloading Ubuntu LiveCD and got basically the same result as (2), it just wound up with a dark screen after loading.
4. I just tried using the fedora LiveCD on another computer and it works!

It looks to me like somehow the motherboard, DVD player or some other hardware is not compatible. The HD and it's file system are completely out as a cause for the problem.

Do you agree? Anything to try, or is this just going to be a Windows system?

Thanks a bunch!

[MikeTbob]

You could try some of the kernel boot codes like
noacpi acpi=off
Do you know how to enter the boot codes?

EDIT: the dark screens could just be video problems and nothing serious.

[j8500]

No, I do not; how do you enter them?

[MikeTbob]

No, I do not; how do you enter them?

You can temporarily modify Grub's boot options at boot time. When Grub's menu appears, select the system you want to boot and press e to edit. Select the kernel line in the next screen and press e again to edit that line. Make your changes and then press Enter to accept or Esc to cancel. Finally, press b to boot with your changes. These changes apply to the current session only, and will revert when you reboot.


[CODE]kernel /boot/kernel-2.6.30-gentoo-r2 root=/dev/sda1 noapic acpi=off[/CODE]
It'll look like this, when you are done.

[j8500]

I thank you for the help. You provide an important asset to us newbie’s. I tried a different hard drive and it installed properly, so it is fixed. Apparently, the first hard drive was simply defective. I still do not know why exactly the LiveCD restarted into a black screen, but you are probably right, just the video driver did not load on restart or something.

I look forward to limiting Bill Gates profit off me in the future, and this is my first step.

Thanks again!