Being the obvious newbie to Linux the question of how to have
both Windows 98 Second Edition and the Fedora Core 4 distro on
the same drive presents a problem when Core 4 will not correct
the MBR on the 98 primary partition.

A 5 1/4" drive selector to switch from the primary drive's XP
installation to a secondary 98/Fedora default duel boot seems
to present a complex issue for the newcomer here. The live cd
distros like Knoppix and Ubuntu have no problems for obvious
reasons there to get familiar with a non MS operating system.
But someone is going to have to take me by the nose to get a
working duel boot with these two versions of each OS.

This question has been posted on other forums to no avail. It
is now time to go to the Linux crowd for tutoring to see if it
is even a possible setup.

might try reading

http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux...w2k-HOWTO.html

The links offered there seem to be the place that explains how to work with dos/Windows FAT32 type partitions with the fips utility. The 98/Fedora drive will be more or less isolated with
a drive selector to be installed at a later point. Being a newbie here one link that would be
a good example couldn't be added here. The INDEX 400 by Indus Technologies is that one.

What is this? Upon installing Fedora Core 4 you have to enter an administraor's root password. That's no big issue. Suddenly up of the clear blue Core 4 decides to run "after" the XP primary drive was reconnected.
The commands here were used when the grub loader came up instead of 98.
unhide (hd1,0)
hide (hd1,1)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1
makeactive
boot
And 98 decides to load following that string. But upon hide (hd1,0) OOPS! The grub loader has now made the
XP drive useless when it reboots right after the screen goes black for a minute where the welcome screen is
generally seen. That was noticed after Fedora came to life only to meet a username and password prompt that
was never seen while installation was in progress. Fixmbr as well fixboot have been tried to restore the XP
drive to working without a reformat. That didn't work. The istall to repair option also failed due to the
partition being labeled as an unknown? instead of vfat. Now how do you remove grub to get XP running again?

UPDATE: "BOOT MENU CORRUPTED" on primary drive according the initial boot of the primary drive. Primary was
invisible to the secondary drive now running XP until "chkdsk /r", "fixboot C:", and "fixmbr C:" were tried.
Upon seeing the primary listed in explorer, a right click and tools tab check off of scan for bad sectors as
well as scan for file errors is running to prevent a reformat of the primary. Fedora Core 4 did run until a
request for user name and password is reached. Do you need one assigned by Red Hat to run Fedora?

UPDATE? XP primary drive files retrieved with boot disk. XP temporarily installed over 98/Fedora install for
backups to be made. Problem? Upon initial use of grub loader entered incorrect instruction for 98 partition
to be hidden in order to load Core 4 as default OS on second drive. It made the XP primary inactive instead.
Primary is now seen and accessible with secondary drive. The question now since the Grub loader is still on
the primary is what will be needed to unhide and make active that drive. Is there a floppy or cd image that
can be used to enter the unhide and make active commands to restore the primary?

OK let us finish your problem ASAP so that we could go back to the party.

You have been quite confusing with your information. The Post suggests that you want Fedora and XP on the same drive but your post #1 describing you have installed them in two disks and been swapping the disk order to get both of them to work. That is a serious mistake and should be stopped. Both XP and Linux keeps a record of their connection positions in the motherboard and will not run after an alteration, unless you know how to edit the system files.

Few things you should know.

(1) MBR is the first 512 bytes of the 1st bootable disk. If you installed XP it will always be in the first bootable disk (primary IDE connection) and XP's MBR will be there. Swapping the disks will cause XP losing out the 1st bootable status and that requires the disk order "re-map" on-the-fly using the Grub's "map" statement. If you repair XP's MBR you must also reconnect it back to the first bootable disk position, otherwise it will put MBR on the second disk.

(2) You should freeze the physical disk swap and concentrate on getting both systems configured to work to the setting permanently.

(3) You need tools. A Live CD is only half of it but a Grub bootable floppy is "highly" recommended in your case. Since you have Ubuntu Live CD so make one following the instructions below

boot up Ubuntu Live CD as it has Grub inside
Ask Ubuntu where it stores it Grub's stage1 and stage2 files by instruction

I could have misinterpreted your information as you could have put the two system together in one disk but the above two items of information will enable us to solve the puzzle.
Ubuntu will return with a subdirectory name , say it is /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc (adjust in accordance with you own circumstance) your change directory to this subdirectory by
You then pop a floppy into the drive and write the stage1 and stage2 onto the floppy by "dd" commands
This Grub floppy can boot any PC system manually.
-------------------------------------
Now the cure
-------------------------------------

Perhaps the easiest is to let XP disk as the first bootable but I can offer instructions if you want it anywhere. Lets say your Fedora is in the second disk. Time to try the mighty Grub floppy

Boot up the Grub floppy. As your XP is in the first partition (standard for XP) of the first bootable disk Grub will identify it as (hd0,0) or hda1 in Linux. These 3 lines will boot XP even if its MBR has been completely trashed.
If this works pour yourself a drink to celebrate booting your XP first time "WITHOUT" using the MBR!

Now the fixing of the Fedora can be different according how you installed it. To progress with precise instructions can you freeze the disk order from now on. Give up these two items of information

(i) The hard disks partition information - You can boot up a Live CD, click terminal and type
and list it content for us to see. This should be a cut and paste job.

(ii) Fedora's files /boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/fstab - I am assuming you can't boot to Fedora so use the standard method. Now let's make the Grub floppy earn its keep and ask it to find out which partition has /boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/fstab by booting the floppy up and type
Grub should return with something like (hd1,2) because Fedora is in the second disk (hd1). I am assuming it is in the 3rd partition here. Grub always counts from 0.
Can you use this information to get Grub list the two files out and the screen and write them dowm for us. No cut and paste convenience here. It isn't long but will be an excellent education for you.

/boot/grub/menu.lst tells us how Grub boots Fedora while /etc/fstab tells us the files Fedora has been instructed to load after installation. We can then amend them to suit your newly frozen disk order.

The content of the files can be listed by Grub using commnads
I am using (hd1,2) and (hd1,4) as examples but please adjust according to those reported by Grub.

Give us the two items of information and we will be able to get you home free in the next reply.

I could have misinterpreted your information incorrectly but the above information is needed for others to assist you further.

The current problem is restoration of the XP primary where Core 4 installed the Grub loader. The error there
is even more problematic with an unrecoverable MBR using the fixboot and fixmbr as well as fixmbr /rebuild.
With the ntldr, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini files on a floppy the XP installation loads normally. The lack of
a means of isolating the first drive from the Fedora install was lacking. As you can note here the use of a
drive selector that would completely and electrically isolate the primary drive is underconsideration at this
time for preventing any further interferences from anything installed on the secondary.

The Fedora/98SE would have otherwise been a success except for the need of a user name and password when the
GNU/Grub successfully loaded both 98 and later the latest Core 4 where the prompt was the issue. Since only a
adminstrator's root password was requested during the installation the prompt there stalled everything. XP is
currently on both drives to provide ready access not only to the primary but to the Linux distros, loaders,
and other Linux utilities being stored there due to the larger capacity of the drive. The conversion of the
hidden fat16 partition placed on the primary XP drive was corrected along with the removal of ms.sys, io.sys,
and autoexec.bat files there. The secondary has now been reformatted with XP in order to backup all of those
Linux downloads not presently written to removable media. Hopefully the method to restore the primary's mbr
without a complete wipe of the drive can be found. There is one utility someone just brought up that isolates
one drive from another when Linux is running so as not to interfere with other drives or partitions.

The mention of (hd1,0) should be noted here. Upon using the "hide (hd1,0)" command along with the commands of "rootnoverify (hd1,0)", "chainloader +1", "makeactive", and "boot" 98 still loaded on the secondary until
it was realized that the correct entry was "hide (hd0,0)" not (hd1,0) which was now the secondary to Linux.
The Grub loader then made the primary invisible instead of loading Core 4. After an effective repair has been
done on the primary and it is isolated the secondary can be used again for 98SE/Linux. Why else would you see
a name like "Linux Newcomer"?!

I do not believe your MBR intereference between Linux and Windows exists and this shows 3 Dos and 3 Windows can co-exist with 97 Linux/BSD in the same box.

You may be unaware that Grub has a "map" command to allow you to "re-map" the disk order on-the-fly.

At present the MBR no longer exists on the XP primary while the three basic files of NTLDR,
NTDETECT.COM, and BOOT.INI will ready load XP from a floppy disk. The advice at Microsoft for
repair of the mbr by the use of the "fdisk /mbr" command now sees "missing operating system"
upon attempts to boot the XP drive. The secondary drive is presently disconnected until the
primary has been repaired if possible. That holds over 150gig of Linux distros, utilities, and
even Live cd versions. That can not be backed up on the secondary due to the volume of data
being stored on the primary. A new mbr has to be created from thin air to make the primary an
independent bootable drive again. Fixboot, fixmbr, and even bootcfg /rebuild failed to see a
result to restore the primary. Repartitioning and reformatting for a full reinstallation of XP
is not an option here.

For the time being the NT type boot floppy has to boot the primary in order to preserve the
extensive amount of files and data stored. The secondary will be available for 98 and various
Linux distributions where Grub4Dos will be the better loader than anaconda's installation of
the GNU/Grub loader that effected the primary. Making the primary bootable again will save the
Linux as well as Windows files stored where it can be isolated when creating partitions and
installing 98SE along with the various Linux distros. Ntfs4dos will later be used to access
the Linux files stored on the XP primary drive. Western Digital's own boot loader was knocked
out when the Grub was installed to the primary. This issue of restoration without wiping the
XP primary has been addressed directly to the Western Digital support staff awaiting response.
Your prompt responses are greatly appreciated and will be noted.

From my limited knowledge with XP booting mechanism, as I didn't study it until I went into Linux 1.5 years ago, I believe it can only boot itself if the three basic files of NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, and BOOT.INI are inside its root partition. The idea of having these 3 files elsewhere is the M$'s method of dual booting XP by a Dos-based system together. In such a case you have to boot to that Dos-based system first, which can be a Dos or Win3x or Win9x, the boot.ini then gives you the choice to select the Dos-based system or hoop to the XP. The hooping mechanism relies on the remainder of the 3 files. However in order to "hoop" correctly the multi()disk()rdisk()partition() as defined inside the boot.ini must match the XP's position. Altering the disk order is possible but the boot.ini must be amended.

It appears to me there is no problem with the XP's MBR which I always restore with just a Dos floppy. (I believe M$ systems has a common MBR and so consistently I use a Dos floppy's fdisk /mbr to restore Win2k/XP MBR but use a Win2k/XP CD's fixmbr to restore a Dos's MBR).

There is a good chance your XP would boot itself if the correct versions of the above-mentioned 3 files are put back in its "C" drive.

They were there already. The three above mentioned files are those used for booting an NTFS type OS when the
boot sector and/or MBR has been lost or damaged. The bootup with the ntdetect.com, ntldr(nt loader), and the
boot.ini produce a search for any NTFS OS installations on a drive. From there the detected version of that
version of Windows is initiated and loads as if the MBR had instructed it to load. In the case of the drive
here the anaconda installer put the GNU/Grub Legacy onto the primary interferring with the Western Digital
EZ Load drive utiity. Upon entering the wrong instruction for hiding the 98 partition Linux made the XP drive
inactive instead of hiding the 98.

At first it was assumed that the wrong command could be corrected by entering "hide (hd0,0)" where the prior
instruction given to Grub was "hide (hd1,0)". That is where the error made the primary invisible and damaged
the WD loader itself. After loading up to Windows with the NTFS type boot floppy, the ms.sys, io.sys, and the
autoexec.bat files were eventually removed from the drive after even using the recovery console when booting
with the XP installation cd. What saved over 140-150gb of Linux distros, utilities, and other files? Bootcfg,
fixmbr, and fixboot commands failed there. Western Digital's own boot disk made when the primary was first
installed just saved the day with the "DLG.EXE" backup/restore Track #0 utility found on their floppy! A new
fresh reinstallation of XP was no issue since a 13 month old installation needed refreshing anyway. That was
never the problem. In fact XP only deleted the Windows directory there. Most of the software can still run
by creating a desktop shortcut due to XP's backup of the system registry despite the wipe of C:\Windows. Most
of the software is currently up and running on the primary at this time.

Now for the other matter of removing XP from the secondary after isolating the XP primary drive. This will
prevent Grub from being installed again on the XP drive until a drive selector can be installed. Grub4Dos is
the selected choice over the Legacy since the dos version presents a prompt everytime. The Legacy version is
set by manual edits where the G4D simply asks for a choice to be made. The Fedora Core 4 still presents a big
problem since it required a user name and password when it's gui comes up. No user name or password was set
other then the administrator's root password when installed. Where do you get the user name/password from?
Red Hat.org after purchase if a commercial distribution? Is there something missing with the iso images?

Slackware, ubuntu, dmmsmall, and Red Hat desktop have been waiting for a chance now that the primary drive
has been resolved. After a few more items are reinstalled on the XP drive it will be unplugged to allow 98SE
to replace the temporary XP installation there. The drive is now available for repartitioning with Linux as
the favored OS since the Audigy 4 Pro recently replacing the Audigy 2 ZS Gamer sound card has no support for
98 only 2000 and XP. But Linux also offers some hope in that direction. Should Fedora Core 4 return? Or will
it have to be replaced by another version due to the lockout without an assigned user name and password?

If you have a 3rd party boot loader from WD and want to use it then you should not use Grub because many 3rd party boot loaders do not conform to PC standard. Some of them have no place to live and have create extra sector for own residence. Grub will not know that and always assume the operating system is behind the boot sector track.

You can use either WD boot loader or Grub to dual boot Ntldr but not both together. I couldn't see how 3 boot loaders can work together. You can do a search but I think Grub and Lilo are not written to work with more than two boot loaders in one booting sequence. Neither of them will work if the system's own boot loader isn't available at the 513th byte of the partition.

When you employ Grub to boot XP you let Grub takes over the MBR or the first 512 bytes of the first bootable disk. Grub then load its stage2 file and displays the Fedora menu for you to choose system to boot. On selecting XP Grub will "cut" its first 512 bytes and "paste" the XP boot loader at the "513th byte position and the whole lot is loaded into memory. It is XP's boot loader that boot XP. This is the standard method of multi booting in PC, the same technique NTldr uses to boot a Linix.

Hiding and unhiding do not damage a system. Each partition has one byte entry, the 16 byte partition table, to denote its Id and Grub's hiding command simply "flip" its 5th bit. Hiding a Fat16, Fat32 and NTFS partitions simply turn the Id from 6, b and 7 to 16, 1b and 17 respectively. The unhiding command will restore the orginal Id. I have done a fair amount of hiding and unhiding work as I run 3 Dos + 3 Windows. I even have to hide the entire extended partition with 55 logical partitions when booting several versions of BSD and Solaris in the same box. I can confirm that you should not get any damage from the hiding and unhiding commands. The partition is always there. It is the operating system on seeing a partition foreign to it proceed to bypass it. That is all.

As far as your Fedora is concerned you can use Grub4Dos to boot it as I also run it myself and take pride in a Dos . Fat16 partition unable to see beyond 2Gb and cannot recognised a Sata but with Grub4Dos I can boot from it any system in my two Sata and distros at the end of a 200Gb disk.

You can also "hoop" from a Live CD (or any installed Linux) into the Fedora, alter its root passwd, add a user, set the password for this new user. The matter sound like hacking so I will not publicly show it here.

I don't know why can't you use root password to get into Fedora. Was you the owner of Fedora?

First the Grub loader prompt didn't appear after the Fedora Core installation was loaded. Upon rebooting it
after the user name and password prompt appeared there was no prompt to unhide either the 98 or XP primary.
This is why Grub4Dos or another Linux version of Grub will be selected. The Western Digital utility that was
used to restore the primary drive's MBR operates independent of any installed operating system. This is a WD
drive utility for backing up and restoration of the existing MBR. It wouldn't have mattered if even Win3.1 is
installed on a Fat16 partition. The backup was made when XP was first installed. The EZ Loader was later put
on after a reinstall to repair was performed prior to the initial downloads of the Linux distros.

The Primary Master drive will operate independent of any 98/Linux activities by being unplugged and later be
isolated with a drive selector that electrically separates the drives. To understand what a drive selector is
the link here can illustrate one brand. http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTk3 This is used for being
able to isolate one drive from another totally. Grub wasn't supposed to be installed on the XP primary. But?
Being a Linux newcomer presents some problems as you have gathered. The second drive can be used for various
Linux distros along with 98 as long as the primary is isolated or unplugged. The idea here is not for a dual
boot of Linux with XP. Once the secondary is up and running with Linux and 98 on the first partition, the XP
primary can be accessed using the NT4Dos utiltiy available.

In regards to the Fedora Core 4 there was no mention of needing any proprietary ownership upon downloading
the dvd or cd-r iso images at: http://fedora.redhat.com/ Being a Linux "newbie" the downloads were made in
order to get familiar with the operating system. Live cds like Knoppix, ubuntu, and Gentoo have already been
up and running without problems. The download of Fedora was supposed to a free OS version as thought. But a
look by you at the fedora.redhat.com site would answer that question for you. Most of the Linux sites visited
offer a cd or dvd copy for the price of shipping and handling. A full version Red Hat distribution wasn't the
thing looked at when downloading the iso images from the Fedora Project. Fedora can easily be substituted for
another Linux distro that has no need of a commercial liscense. A desktop version of Linux not server edition
is what is being looked for here. Red Hat commercial is mainly for running server cases. A Red Hat desktop
version now on dvd can easily be a substitute along with Slackware, SUS, Mandrake, dmmsmall, or others.

I laughed at the link that use hardware to switch 3 hard disks for 3 operating systems. How can people be so ignorant.

This is my write-up to show how one can boot 100+ systems with one Grub. There is no need to buy a hard ware device to arrange the hard disk booting order and I have the 100+ systems spreading over 4 disks.

I correct your first misconception by pointing to you that Grub is controlled by a text file always stored as /boot/grub/menu.lst. If you want Grub to do anything you edit this file. The Grub menu I boot 100+ system is such a file.

I have asked to you make a Grub bootable floppy. Go over Post #7. Please learn how to boot each system manually. That way you can achieve your target a lot quicker. There is no problem in booting 2 XP as I used Grub to boot 4 XP when I started to build my 100+ systems.

I correct your second misconception by pointing out that all the Dos and Windows can be installed in the same PC without the need to isolate them electrically. You can use Grub to hide each partition in front of the partition you want to boot and unhide it when you want to boot it. I have told you this already. The write-up documents the Grub statements I used to boot 3 Dos + 3 Windows in the company of 97 Linux/BSD. You should either throw away this hardware device and learn how to use Grub or throw away Grub to use the hardware device. The two do not mix.

You should use Dos4Grub only after you install all the systems.

If you want any free Linux this is the site to get it.

My recommendations to you is as follow

(1) Put the XP up as the first operating system.
(2) Freeze the hard disk order and don't touch it again
(3) Install Fedora. Its Grub will overwrite XP's MBR and should dual boot it too. If it doesn't post the following information here while inside Fedora

(a) Content of the screen after issuing a shell command "fdisk -l"
(b) content of the text file /boot/grub/menu.lst
(c) Content of the text file /ect/fstab

(4) From this point onward stick with the Fedora's Grub for controlling the booting of all other systems.
(5) Make a Grub bootable floppy with Fedora using information descibed in Post #7 of this thread. This is 1st of the 3 tools you need. The 2nd is a Live CD which you have alread. The 3rd is a Dos bootable floopy with fdisk.exe inside or a XP installation CD which you got also. Read Section "C" of my writeup describing the use of these 3 tools.
(6)When you have Fedora and XP working properly, then starting to add Win9x and other systems

You should plan out your need and donot partition the hard disk bigger than what is needed. Depending on how you use it XP is OK between 15 to 25Gb, Win9x needs about 3Gb, one common Swap needs no more than 1Gb and each Linux should be housed in either a 5 or 10Gb partition. Create one Fat32 partition as the neutral ground for your personal data so that it can be read and written by all systems.

I recommend you use only a single partition for its "/" so that all the /boot, /usr, /etc,/home are subdirectories inside.