Serious reservations about FC2 release on 5/18

[Michael Hatzel]

>> But they do not CLAIM to support it.  This would be a different issue
>> if FC2 clearly said that your windows partition would be un-bootable.
>> Instead, it offers to set it up for you.
>
>No they don't.   There is no support at all for anything in Fedora.   AT
ALL.
>Nothing.  If it breaks, you own both halves.   Everyone wants a good
>working system.  We're all here to work towards a better system.  The point
>is that whining is unproductive.  Help the developers solve the problem or
>be quiet until it's fixed.

As far as I know, XP has never been supported using GRUBs chainloader +1
directive.  What I have always had to do is install grub on the first block
of boot, use dd to pull the first block of my /boot partition to a file such
as Linux.bin

dd if=/dev/hda1 of=Linux.bin bs=512 count=1

mount my c:\ under linux, then reboot into windows.  Then edit Boot.ini to
read something like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /fastdetect
c:\Linux.bin="Fedora Core 1"

and then reboot again, and GRUB should run fat dumb and happy.  This is not
a perfect solution, but XP seems to resent being chainloaded.  I'm not sure
if GRUB developers have created a patch or a more efficient work around for
this, but the truth is that dual booting is not a perfect scenario, and
shouldn't really be attempted unless you are sure what it is that you are
doing.  Eventually, I'd like to see some work done in this area, but until
then, I'll do what I have to do to make the best of an awkward situation.

Mike