Friday at ILF we had a Installfest room for anyone wanting help installing linux
The only Distros represented in the Installfest room was Fedora and FreeBSD
the room opened at 9 and was quiet, so at noon i went to meet Pascal who was due to show up to get him in the room and grab some lunch.
After lunch we got back and there was a gentleman there who described himself as a energetic academic who was interested in linux, for this post we will call him “Bob”
Bob has a Desktop and want to have Fedora installed
Bob goes and gets his computer, and brings it back and we back up the data he wants backed up off the second hard drive and install Fedora with a liveusb
For some strange reason Bob’s machine saw the usb key as /dev/sda so when it installled grub it installed to the usb key
and some battleing to install grub to the first HD i grab the F!4 x86_64 DVD and reinstalled.
Bob was happy and I gave him my contact info in case he had any problems.
and gave him instructions on how to yum update and install xchat to get to the #fedora channel if he ran into other problems
Interesting, usually the live image will choose the grub install location according to the installation, and exclude the source device. If you run into problems like that in the future grab the debug logs from the running image and file a bug. Glad you got everything sorted out though!
Could it be that Bob’s computer had a PATA disk drive (/dev/hda)? That might explain why the USB thumb drive was seen as /dev/sda.
Paul
It was an older machine is I think the problem was he needed a bios update.
It was strange, and of course this would be something you would run into at a remote location.
Sum
no actually they were sata drives from what BOB told me (never opened the case to verify).