How to deal with "Partition table on device sda was unreadable"

[Henry S. Greenside]

I tried to upgrade my Thinkpad X61s today with a Fedora 8
64-bit distro on DVD. This laptop has been running Vista
Business and Fedora 7 for many months and I have had no
trouble installing Fedora in the past. 

But this time I have been stymied. When I tried to install
Fedora 8, I got as far as the screens that ask for language
and keyboard type, but then got this error message

   "The partition table on device sda was unreadable"

when I got to the pages related to setting up partitions,
followed by the option to destroy all partitions. (I don't
think so.)

Searching the Internet indicates this is a known bug 

  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/F8Common#head-6908d00fe8346c4da773d32c5d1aaf3415d9713f

and the fix is evidently to type something like

    linux libata.ignore_hpa=1

at the boot prompt. I tried this as follows: when I got to
the Welcome screen (the very first screen of the F8 install
procedure), I hit the escape key, which brought me to a some
kind of shell window with a prompt. I then typed the above
line

    linux libata.ignore_hpa=1

but ran into the same problem, the partition table was
unreadable, so installation failed.

So I have two questions:

- What am I doing wrong? For example, am I supposed to give
  the command
  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/F8Common#head-6908d00fe8346c4da773d32c5d1aaf3415d9713f
  to the prompt at some point during installation?

- Does anyone know how to work around this bug?

    Thanks,

    Henry