This website helped identify the problem:
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=271743
I was booting the Fedora LiveCD from "EFI" mode rather than BIOS mode. To find out which mode you are currently booting under, use the following steps:
First, when you have booted to the fedora liveCD, press Ctrl+Alt+F2 which will bring up a new prompt. Login as root (no password). Then use this command:
dmesg | grep EFI
If this command produces no output, or perhaps one or two lines in which "EFI" is embedded in other words, then you're booted in BIOS mode. If, however, you get dozens of lines of output, most of which refer to EFI memory settings, then Linux is booted in UEFI mode.
My problem was that I was booting the Fedora CD in UEFI mode because the DVD player I was using was from a previous older computer. So in order to alleviate the errors defined at the top, we will have to get fedora to boot in BIOS mode, not EFI mode.
Solution:
Reboot the computer, pressed Delete to get into the BIOS, (you may have to use a different key). Go over to your boot options. You see "Boot Priority Order", the first boot priority device was set to EFI: DVD Rom. This was my problem, the DVD I poached from another computer was screwing up how Fedora was installing.
My BIOS Setup utility is by ACER Inc Version 2.14.
The solution is to change this Boot priority to use the other DVD Rom setting: (mine said: "CD&DVD: HL-DT-ST DV..." which does not include the term "EFI". I set this to be higher than the other one.
So it turns out that if you poach a DVD drive from another computer into a new computer, it can give you trouble when trying to install Fedora 17.