Grub doesn't install

[Ian]

Hi Jim,
Thanks for the response.
My problem is, though, that I can't boot FC4 at all, because grub didn't 
get installed when I reinstalled FC4. The master boot record still 
contains lilo from my install of Mandrake, and it won't boot FC4. So I 
have no way of changing any grub settings. I think they call it stuck 
between a rock and a hard place...
Ian

Jim Cornette wrote:

> Ian wrote:
>
>> Hi All,
>> I'm not a Linux guru but I would like to use Linux as an alternative 
>> to Windoze wherever possible. To that end I've tried installing a few 
>> different distros, the latest being FC4, but I appear to have screwed 
>> something up with grub. Sorry, but it's a long story so please bear 
>> with me.
>> I had Mandrake 10.0 Official installed on the second hard drive in my 
>> PC (XP is on the primary drive) which used lilo (could never get grub 
>> to work) as it's bootloader, and all was fine. Then I tried FC4, 
>> which installed grub and again everything seemed to work okay, but I 
>> couldn't get FC4 to recognise my Windoze drive. Tried mounting the 
>> drive as ntfs but it told me ntfs was not a valid file type. 
>
>
> Fedora does not come with ntfs modules. you have to install the 
> modules from a source which provides  rpms for your distro and kernel 
> version/type.
> If you are talking about an entry in grub to  boot windows, it ought 
> to be visible if you press any key when grub starts loading. you 
> should be able to arrow up or down to your preferred OS to load.
>
>> A bit of RTFMing told me that the valid file types had to live in a 
>> specific file (the name of which I've forgotten now, but you probably 
>> know it). ntfs wasn't in there so I added it. Now the mount command 
>> told me /hda had an invalid or unrecognisable header. At that point I 
>> gave up.
>
>
> There seems to be some modules for FC4 at this website. Grab the one 
> for your kernel/type and install it using the rpm program.
>
> http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/fedora4.html
>
>>
>> Finally found my way to this forum, and found the post about booting 
>> with "linux rescue", chroot /mnt/sysimage and grub-install /dev/hda. 
>> Tried that and got a message saying /dev/hdb1 (where FC4 is 
>> installed) did not have a valid BIOS file (sorry, again I don't 
>> remember exactly what the message said, but it was something along 
>> those lines. It definitely mentioned /dev/hdb1 and BIOS). Now I'm 
>> really stuck.
>
>
> there should be a file in your /boot/grub directory called device.map, 
> my file contains the below. There is some grub command which will 
> reset this file. I however never had to do this. It tells grub where 
> your devices are mapped to. What does your file read? 
> (/boot/grub/device.map)
> cat device.map
> # this device map was generated by anaconda
> (fd0)     /dev/fd0
> (hd0)     /dev/hda
>
>> During FC4 install I created 3 partitions on my drive, one for /boot, 
>> one for swap and the rest for /. I formatted all partitions prior to 
>> each install.
>
>
> This sounds acceptable as a layout.
>
>> My PC has an AMD2200+, 512Mb, primary drive is 40Gb (Win) and slave 
>> is 10Gb (Linux).
>> All help very gratefully received!
>
>
> Good luck with your adventure through Linux distros.
> Jim
>
>> Ian
>>
>
>