Apparently Fedora doesn’t like it when you try to install it on an SATA drive on a Dell system that also has an aftermarket IDE extension kit. Which kind of makes sense, as you need drivers to get the PCI IDE extension kit to work normally. I guess I expected more…
I would install Fedora (or Red Hat or Debian) and it would go through the entire install process. Upon reboot and after the POST, I would get the error “Error loading operating system.” Score!
After many minutes of searching through bulletin boards, I learned that many other people had the same issues I was having, but with no success story. Some blamed it on the motherboard, some the video card. I finally got fed up, opened the box, ripped out the IDE cable, and tried again. Success! No problems whatsoever. I’m assuming that either an old version of Windows is on the IDE drive or Fedora just despises the extension card.
Oh well, I finally have a server. Print, file and ftp services.