Fedora Core 5 + WinXP Pro

[Lyvim Xaphir]

On Sun, 2006-04-16 at 21:27 +0100, Adam Tunbridge wrote:
> I get the feeling dual-boot systems are a /dirty /subject round here but 
> needs must I'm afraid. Right, I'm having issues loading Fedora Core 5. I 
> have 2 hard-drives:
> 
> 80GB  (we'll call this /D1/)
> 100GB (we'll call this /D2/)
> 
> I started by installing WinXP on /D1/. Then I installed Fedora on /D2, 
> /using GRUB on the MBR of /D1/. This didn't work.  My system just booted 
> straight into XP. Then I tried the same but installed GRUB on the first 
> sector of /D2/. Same result. Now I've just tried the same install but 
> *without *installing GRUB and tried Acronis OS Selector instead. This 
> wouldn't event detect the existence of Fedora. I'm a complete noob when 
> it comes to Linux (Well, partial noob really. Read a few books) so 
> please explain what I'm doing wrong in moderately simple terms.
> 

The first thing you should understand is that the machine always cycles
to the boot records of the devices in their installed sequence.  Since
you installed WinXP to the first drive and not Grub, naturally the boot
record is being read there first before anything else.  1st drive = XP
boot record.

What you should always do is give Fedora the first spot, no matter what.
You also need to ensure that you have a boot record in place that is
"factory".. or what I call factory anyway.  This will make it easier for
Grub to rewrite it.  You should understand that M$ is actively making it
harder to do what you are doing.  Just keep that in mind; but also
remember that they aren't winning.

First thing I would do is change drive positions.  Make the 100GB
the /dev/hda or the /dev/sda, whichever bus you are on, ide or sata;
make the 80GB /dev/hdb or hdc or whatever.  Just as long as the 80 is
not occupying the /dev/hda or sda spot.

Assuming you still cannot boot, you need to reset your boot record prior
to reinstalling grub.  You can either use an msdos rescue disk and boot
off of that, then type

fdisk c: /mbr

Or you can download an excellent partition table viewer and boot table
restorer

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/

And use the partition table tools to make the boot record "factory".

After you restore the boot record, use the FC5 rescue disk to boot up
and load your system; i.e., mount your FC5 partitions on the 100g.  Use
the chroot command to pivot the root to your 100g partitions, as
instructed.  Then use grub to reinstall itself to the 100g boot sector.

After that you can use Timothy Murphy's entry in your grub.conf to allow
you to boot into the XP drive.

XP does not require the first drive, it can be installed on a "D" drive.
Even after FC5 has been installed; which is the way I prefer to do it.
I usually do it that way, but I make sure my boot sector is backed up
on /dev/sda with the following:

dd if=/dev/sda of=sda_bootsec.img bs=512 count=1

*BEFORE xp gets installed.

XP attempts to make your dual boot install as annoying as possible by
doing stupid things; for instance, if you have what I call a "no man's
land", a vfat partition in place between your Linux and XP partitions,
then when you install XP it will install it's ntldr, boot.ini and
ntdetect.com to the vfat partition, instead of putting it on it's own
ntfs partition.  It puts those files as close to the front of the drive
as it can get.  Since it does that, quite naturally that means you need
to force it to go as far to the rear as possible. :)

In the case above the problem was resolved when I included the ntfs
partiton in the grub.conf and also copied ntldr, boot.ini and
ntdetect.com to the root of the ntfs partition.  After that, Grub was in
full control; and I could either boot dos 7.10 in No Man's Land or I
could boot XP on the ntfs.

LX
-- 
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 precipitately departed lacteal fluid.
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