You have not yet designated any disk partitions as type Linux. If you are planning to use OS/2 Boot Manager, make your Linux partitions with OS/2 fdisk (or Partition Magic, which also includes Boot Manager), format them, reboot this disk, and then use Linux fdisk to tag the partitions as type 83 (Linux). Linux fdisk will select a default device when called without arguments, and from there it is menu driven. If you don't want to partition the default device, then call fdisk with the device you want as the argument, like this: fdisk /dev/hdb or this: fdisk /dev/sda If you are not using the OS/2 Boot Manager, then you may use Linux fdisk to create partitions for Linux. Other than the exception for the OS/2 Boot Manager, you are usually better off creating partitions for a given OS using a partitioning tool native to that OS. In other words, you probably shouldn't try to make your DOS or other non-Linux partitions with the Linux fdisk. "cfdisk" is an equally good version of Linux fdisk that is more graphical and menu driven. Many people prefer to use "cfdisk". Please make one or more partitions for Linux, and try setup again. If you haven't already, you might want to also make a swap partition while you're in fdisk. 64 megabytes would be a minimum starting size for a single user system. Linux swap is tagged as type 82.