Fedora... You've been charged with the high crime of becoming a terrible distribution. A trial by your peers will commence this Friday, June fifteenth in the two-thousand and seventh year of our Lord. If any of your peers succeed in installing where you have failed, you will be summarily executed (or not executed ever again as it may be) by Chad Jorgenson, High Council judge for the community NETWORK which you belong. May God show mercy on you.
Well, I've finally had it with Fedora. The first distribution I'll try tonight with my "unmodified" system will be debian. And the Kubuntu. And then Suse. And then if all those fail, Fedora 7 gets another try; I'll install a PATA drive and set the bios to boot from that and see if it works. And then start the trial installations all over again. Look for more updates.
----- Update -----
Well, apparently other distros suffer from the same issue, as Fedora 7 does, roughly speaking. True the others didn't actually lock up when they went to detect the hardware and saw SATA drives in RAID 0 mode, but they still didn't see all the partitions as I set them up when I installed windows. So my only option was to install to an older drive (parallel) and unfortunately use my BIOS to select which drive to boot from. Still not optimal, but a better option that unplugging and plugging back in hard drives as I was doing the last two semesters. Now my current effort is focused on getting the special desktop effects setup and working.