fedora core 3 install error no drives found

My first bit of advice is that you should never buttume that people are going to go out of their way to research the rest of a Usenet thread (which isn't always possible, given non-uniform propagation of articles), before attempting to help you. And they certainly aren't likely to do that if you reply to someone and don't bother to quote from the prior article for context -- which you failed to do, in this caes.

You are the person seeking help. It's in your interest to make it as easy as possible for people to buttist you. If you don't make at least somewhat of an effort, the experienced users whom you're addressing are very likely to just ignore your post and buttist someone else who didn't make the job needlessly difficult.

Our of curiosity, in this one case, I did go look up what seems the initial post in this thread (yours):

This is not a "board". This is a Usenet newsgroup carried on autonomous news servers all over the planet. Each newsgroup's postings are typically called "netnews" and individual postings are called "articles".

No. It's good that you're trying to think this through, but you're guessing somewhat randomly, at this point. What you really want to do is just accurately describe the symptoms and then ask more-experience Linux users their buttessments. Let's take it from there:

The "no valid devices" message from Fedora Core's "anaconda" installer usually means that hardware autoprobing didn't succeed in finding a mbutt storage chip it recognised well enough to load a driver.

See these pages:

It turns out that the Dell Optiplex GX620 happens to be based on an Intel 945G motherboard chipset, which has something like an Intel ICH6 south bridge chipset providing the hard drive support. You're probably using a Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive, so you're going to be using the ahci driver.

Basically, the GX620 is just a bit too new for the hardware autorecognition code in Fedora Core 3's (FC3's) installer. There are undoubtedly ways to finagle FC3 into installing anyway, but frankly you'll be much better off using the FC4 installer, instead.

Consider that, please.

-- Cheers, Rick Moen "Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor."