I've use fedora for a while (my first and only distro) and I've had great results. I have one hdd with two partitions for fedora (it's been a while since i've installed fedora) and one for win XP.

The grub bootloader has worked incredibly for the last year while constantly interchangeing OS's. Yesterday for some apparent reason the boot sector with XP (if that's what it's called) stopped loading. I don't get an error message but I do it does say:

{
Booting 'Other'

rootnoverify (hd 0,1)
chainloader +1
}

I'm not sure what this means, fedora 7 still loads without problems but XP does not, I'm not sure how it happened because everything I do in XP is on the OS.

Anything I can do to remedy the situation without reinstalling grub. Simple solution?

Thanks, Ken and I did search in other forums.

It looks like your menu.lst file has been changed for some reason. Go into Fedora, open the file boot/grub/menu.lst and post back what entry is listed for windows. It should read something like:

title Windows
makeactive
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1

If Fedora is still booting OK it must be that the entry for windows has changed for some reason. The entry for windows may look a little different than what is listed above, but it should be similar.

Hope that helps

Bob

Thanks for that, my results of menu.lst are as follows:

title Other
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1

That's it. Off the topic question, if i change the title 'Other' to 'Windows' in menu.lst It will appear as windows in the bootloader as well? If I change that will I have to change the 'Other' name in another place?

Thanks again

the title thing is what appears in the bootloader, naming it "Windows" or "WindowsXP" is a good idea, i think

Yes, if you change "Other" to Windows that is how it will appear on your boot screen. What you put after "title" is optional. The entry for windows should have passed the boot process to windows (it doesn't look like it has changed as I thought). All of my entries have always included "makeactive" as well (without the quotes). You should always have a back-up of your menu.lst file in case it gets corrupted for changed by some update, as recently happened to me. From the back-up you can always put the file right in case it goes bad.

If windows has always booted for you with that entry, then it still should. You might want to make a back up of what you have and try adding the "makeactive" entry to the windows menu entry (without the quotes)

It could also be that your windows boot.ini file has changed. Hopefully, someone with a little more knowledge of windows will post back.

Bob

well, i can conclude that all the loader is doing when i run the windows part is list the contents of menu.lst for the windows title.

does that mean that it's a windows problem? it seems like this is still a linux problem.


how would i be able to get to the boot.ini file from linux, or would i need to boot from a disk?

Please post the output of "fdisk -l" (run as root and note the lower-case ell---not one).

The configuration in menu.lst is saying that windows is on the 2nd partition of the first drive. The more normal config is the first partition, but this should work. Looking at BobNutfield's example, I think "makeactive" needs to go after the "root" statement. I'm trying to remember if re-mapping is required in this situation---or only if Windows is on the 2nd drive.

That's what chainloader does.

Yes, pixallany, you are right. makeactive goes after rootnoverify. I shouldn't rely on a memory like mine,

Bob

OOPS!!!---Me make boo-boo!
boot.ini is the config file. Chainloading is the process that gets you to the Windows boot code in the boot sector of the Windows partition.

You can see boot.ini by mounting the Windows partition--On my system (Win2K) it is in a directory named "WINNT" at the root level.

Yes I installed windows second and I had to reinstall my Grub Bootloader the first time. My fdisk contents: (I ADD THE {})

{

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 7637 61344171 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 7650 19456 94839727+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 7638 7649 96390 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Partition table entries are not in disk order

}

The contents of menu.lst:

{

#boot=/dev/sda
default=1
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora (2.6.21-1.3228.fc7)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.21-1.3228.fc7 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.21-1.3228.fc7.img
title Fedora (2.6.20-2925.9.fc7xen)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/xen.gz-2.6.20-2925.9.fc7
module /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-2925.9.fc7xen ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
module /boot/initrd-2.6.20-2925.9.fc7xen.img
title Fedora-base (2.6.21-1.3194.fc7)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7.img
title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1

}

I'm gonna try rebooting with makeactive in the correct place now. are their code tags i should use here when posting this stuff?

I updated to fedora 8 from scratch, Grub and all. It doesn't seem like fedora's problem because it's still not working

Hello kenny.cusine,

You are probably long gone from here. But I think you're right about that. I believe it's the XP partition's boot sector code that's busted. At least that is what is next in the sequence of events. It is loaded into memory and run by that chainloader grub.conf command. It functions to find and run the file ntldr. If that boot sector code had successfully run, booting would not have stopped with those grub.conf lines still on the screen like that (IMO). There would instead be some other XP related error message such as "NTLDR is missing" or "A disk read error occurred".

I would run the Windows command fixboot in the XP CD's Recovery Console. It rewrites the XP partition's boot sector code. It does nothing to the master boot record, so your GRUB boot loader will not be harmed. But here's the thing: Your XP CD is virtually guaranteed not to boot with that Linux partition sitting there at the very front of the drive. It's a well-known issue. You can try it anyway, but be prepared to have to use an alternative. A good one is TestDisk. It can even be yum installed in Fedora (yum install testdisk). It is not a beautiful GUI app, but it is handy to have around and is capable of doing this job.

Stoat, thank you very much, i'll try that as soon as I get home from school/work. This is the only forum that's given me any clue on how to fix the problem. Thanks to everyone again.