O.K., I just looked at some GRUB 2 references, and it seems like GRUB needs a 512Kb (or maybe just 512 bytes?) of free space after the MBR. So you'll need to move your partitions a bit, which is fairly easy to do. The easiest way is to boot from a Live CD that supports gparted (e.g., System Rescue, but almost any LiveCD distribution should have it available.)

Once you have gparted running, select your hard drive and resize the first partition to start a sector farther from the place where it currently starts. (That will make the first partition one sector smaller, which should not be a significant reduction in that partition's space.) Then go back and try the grub-install again.

Thank you. I will download the rescue CD and foloow what you have suggested and let you know. For the time being I am working in F17 by booting into it through Super Grub Disc.

I created 100 MB unallocated space before partition 1 with GParted and then tried to install Grub2 on /dev/sda, but the same warning, I have mentioned before, came again and it stopped installing. Then finally I tried to install it forcibly with
and this time although the same first two lines of warning came, but finally it said that it had finished installing grub2 without any error being reported. Now I am getting grub menu at the start and can enter f17 as well as windows 7 and so my immediate problem has been solved. Only thing I still could not understand what was the actual problem and whether thing has been stable or not ?
Thanks to you all for your support and help.
- SKD

I had the same problem after a fresh install of Fedora 17 over an existing CentOS distribution. It seems the first stage of the boot loader failed to install (MBR). I already had a boot partition (512MB) at the start of the drive so my issues may not be the same as SKD. However using the --force and --recheck seem to allow the grub2-install command to proceed and succeed. This may work irrispective of the partition layout? Might be worth a try for anyone following this with similar issues.

T.

Hello Everybody, I completely novice to Linux and also new to this forum. I tried to install Fedora 17 from DVD,in dual booting mode with Windows XP SP3. Firstly I created 22 GB Primary partition for installing Windows XP. Then I created two 15 GB partitions respectively,leaving 23 GB free space for installing Fedora 17.I had Installed the Windows XP first. Then I installed Fedora 17 with DVD in that free space following the instructions during the installation process,choosing GNOME. Installation was successful but at the very end it got stuck and error message was displayed After that I tried everything as instructed in this thread above and all the same error message were showing that " dnkskdas " have mentioned in this thread step by step respectively. I tried running
in recovery console as chroot following error message was given,even I tried the followingbut this also went in vain,following error message was given. Still my system is booting to Windows XP only and GRUB is nor showing. I tried to boot Fedora via Supper Grub disc ,but only Windows Xp is showing during that process. Please tell me what went wrong and how to fix the problem.
My Configuration is :
lenovo 3000 J series with
intel chipset Motherboard,
intel pentium 4 processor,
80 Gb Hard Disk,
1.25 Gb Ram,
512 MB NVIDIA Gforce 7600 graphics card.

Thanking you in advance.

I'm guessing this may have something to do with the way you've partitioned your disk. Can you provide more informaiton on your partions?

T.

Disk Partition order as follows respectively :
1. 500 MB boot partition
2. 22.35 GB NTFS (system windows)
3. 15.72 GB basic NTFS
4. 15.67 GB Basic NTFS
5. 20.03 GB Linux.

I have created a 100 MB unallocated space just after the 2nd partition.