FC3 Install Help

[Paul Howarth]

Hiker Mike wrote:
> I am a total Linux newbie. I run Windows2000 on my work system and I 
> have an extra 6 gb IDE hd to experiment with. I made isos of the 
> FC3-i386 disks and installed it solely in the blank IDE drive and not 
> the SCSI drive where everything else is. The problem is that I (thinK) I 
> mistakenly configured GRUB and told it to boot solely off SCA (where 
> windows is) instead of dev/hdd1 where the GRUB bootloader would have 
> been installed. When I boot now, it just goes straight to windows. I 
> never got an option to make a boot disk during the FC3 install. This is 
> actually fine as I really would prefer to boot Fedora solely off a boot 
> disk instead of a boot loader at the outset.
> 
> I tried downloading the RAWWRITE utility and making a disk from the 
> bootimage.img disk available in the ftp directories but that did not 
> work - it just said Boot Failed on a restart. I then tried booting again 
> from FC-3 disk 1 and going into Linux Rescue. Bear in mind, I have not 
> yet even been into Fedora, configured anything, or even seen what it 
> looks like. Using instuctions gleaned from the web, I made myself root 
> using chroot /mnt/sysimage, typed uname -r to get the kernel info 
> (2.6.9-1.667) , and then typed mkbootdisk --device /dev/fd0 2.6.9-1.667. 
> It prompted me to put a disk in, standard warnings, and I hit enter but 
> then get this error:
> cp: writing '/tmp/mkbootsisk .MQc406/initrd.img': No space left on device
> cat: write error: No space left on device
> cat: write error: No space left on device
> 20+0 records in
> 20+0 records out
> 
> and it seems to be making the disk.
> 
> When I reboot with this disk, I get
> syslinux 2.11 2004-08-16 etc...
> Could not find kernal image: linux
> boot:
> 
> Could I get a little help to get me on my way here?

The Linux 2.6 kernel is too big to fit on a floppy, hence you *can't* make a 
boot disk.

See http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm for the "bootpart" utility, which 
will enable you to add Linux to your Windows boot menu. Get it to create a 
boot entry for your first IDE drive partition where it can load up the grub 
bootloader that you installed as part of the FC3 install process.

Regards, Paul.