I got this nifty 160 hard drive for cheap and though it would be nice to have a real installation of Linux to play around with. I download Fedora Core 5 and created two partitions on the new hard drive. The installer takes the free space and makes the /boot and regular partition on the space I left for it. But I have no boot loader and there is even an option to check to install GRUB on /dev/hda. I've tried to manually install GRUB through the rescue part of the installer but it fails if I try it on my primary hard drive but does seem to work on the new one. I don't have a floppy drive anymore so I'm not sure what to do other then repartition my primary drive and put linux there.

Thats what I did, the option is like MBR or /dev/hda or something to that effect.

Moving to Everything Unix.

Does your BIOS have a boot sector protection ? Then this will prevent you from writing a new boot loader to the disk.

That seemed to be the problem but I still had to manually load in GRUB through system restore. But I am making this post with Firefox in Fedora Core 5.