Fedora Core 6 Dual Boot 2 hard drives windows xp issue
 

I have windows xp on my master harddrive. I installed fedora 6 on a brand new harddrive, slave. It finished installing. Now when my computer loads, windows loads automatically. If during boot I tell it to boot of fedora's hard drive, I get a operating system not found error. Is there something I did wrong during installation, is there someway to fix it now, or should I reinstall it and do something else? Any help is appreciated. Thanks

Ken

sounds like you did not install boot loader, put the fc6 dvd in and do an upgrade, when it prompt you for grub install, make sure you install it.

Try This
 

Fedora Core 6 Install

This by all means may not work for everybody.

I run an Intel D865perl motherboard with 2.6 gig Intel processor with 1 gig of ram. Two 250 gig
hard drives. The first hard drive is for Windows XP. Second hard drive is for Fedora and data
backups.

Drive 2 the first 40 gig is Fedora and the second 210 gig is for files backups and Norton ghost 2006
images. Which I never doing anything without a current image file it will save your butt.

Install Fedora Core 6 on the second hard drive and use the automatic partitioning tool but don't
put grub on your Master MBR put it on the first sector on your second drive. When you get to the
Boot Loader Configuration screen make sure you check the Configure advanced boot loader
options. The next screen will give the option where to put Grub Boot Loader. It should say like
hda or hdb. Hda is usually your XP Drive. From their finish loading. Put it on hdb.

Now duel booting using XP boot manager (My Preference. I don't like third party boot managers.)

Use your rescue CD to boot to Fedora.
Hit enter at the boot prompt.
Hit enter for English
Hit enter for us
Setup network select no
At the rescue screen select continue
At the next rescue screen hit enter
Now you have a prompt sh-3.00#
At the prompt type in chroot /mnt/sysimage
If hdb2 is Not your boot partition, change it as appropriate. Type: df then determine which hda#
Run the command dd if=/dev/hdb2 of=boot.lnx bs=512 count=1
You should see
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
Type ls and you should see a file named boot.lnx
Put a blank floppy disk in your a: drive
Type mcopy boot.lnx a:
It should have copied the file to your a: drive

Now reboot to Windows

Copy boot.lnx to your root directory
Right click on your boot.ini file select properties and uncheck read only click ok
Double click your boot.ini file and add one line at the end it should read
C:\boot.lnx="Fedora Core 6". Then save it. When you reboot your XP boot
manager will come up and you can chose Fedora it jumps to the Grub Boot manager on your
second drive.

My file looks like this

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(0)(1)\windows
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(0)(1)\windows="Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2"
/fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
c:\boot.lnx="Fedora Core 6 Project"

You call it anything you want

This method works. Fedora seems to have a problem installing boot loaders. I wish i knew how harley came up with this.

One thing to note, when you edit boot.ini besure to change the timeout to something else.

I been using this method since the early days when Red Hat was free. It's been around for at least 6 or 7 years. But it has been refined to work well with any linux distro.

sorry for no response

thanks very much!

Fedora 6
 

Read this post and carried out the proceedure to try and get my Fedora up and running, without success. Question What is a root directory in windows? Is it 'System32' I have copied the boot.lnx file in here and in 'windows'directory with the following error.
Could not start...... Windows root\system32\hal.dll missing or corrupt.

Took my copy of Vista off my second hard drive and thought I would try Linux.... getting a little depressed, although not as depressed when I installed Vista PHEW!!!

Hope someone can help

The root of the drive is c:/

I have seen the error that you are haveing before, but i dont remember what it is. alot of it depends on what bootloader you are using as default.

Got up and running. formated second drive and forced GRUB on it. Now looking to get my ADSL moden up and running.

Need Help
 

I followed the steps exactly and installed Fedora Core 6. When i tried to boot from "Fedora Core 6 Project", the only thing i got is text "GRUB" and a blink cursor and stop there.

Could anybody tell me what i did wrong? Thanks.

Dear Harley,

The method you post is excellent! However, I've encountered a little problem. My laptop doesn't have a floopy drive so cannot copy boot.lnx to a: drive and I tried but cannot mount my USB flash.

Do you think u can give me a small tip on this one? I am a newbie to linux ><
Many Many Thanks!

RMS

Grub with Blinking Curson
 

I am having the exact same problem as myue. I am not having much success with the solution. I am a newb and have been researching the problem. I have yet to find a solution that I can understand. Please help. I don't mind trying and failing, but I don't know what to try now. I have ensured that I have GRUB on sector 1 of my linux drive. This was confirmed when looking at grub.conf.

Thanks,
Chris

May have found the cause
 

device.map shows

hd0 /dev/hda
hd1 /dev/sda

In reality my sata drive contains the windows xp install and the ide drive contains the linux installation. Is this my problem? I though hd1 was /dev/hda and i thought /boot was hda1.

Need help here.

fdisk -l and post the output

don't know how to cut and past output directly from terminal
 

Here are my results from fdisk -l

device Boot Start End Blocks ID
/dev/hda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 14 14593 117113850 8e Linux LVM


/dev/sda1 * 1 30574 245103673+ 7 HPPS/NTFS