Core 6 installation: Grub does not work on SATA hard disks
 

Hello all,

I am stuck installing Fedora Core 6. The installation process runs without problems and detects all of my hardware, but it apparently installs no bootloader (Grub), no matter which options I select.

The system in question has two Serial ATA, 160 GB hard disks. I have Windows XP on the first hard disk (sda), and need Fedora C6 on the second one (sdb). Both disks are identical. I've tried every option available on the BIOS (the motherboard is an ASUS P4C800 Deluxe).

It seems that Grub is never installed; the system always boots Windows, no matter what I do...

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
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Juan Conejero, Pleiades Software

Most PCs boot from the first hard disk they find, in your case apparently from sda. This is usually also the disk that grub wants to install the bootloader. I am not sure if that is the reason for the strange behavior you experience.

Anyway, a simple workaround is to remove the Windows hard disk and leave the Linux hard disk in the system as the only disk (as sda). Linux should install in such a "standard" configuration without problem. Once you installed Linux, you can insert the Windows disk as a second disk (sdb) and configure grub so that you can select at boot time if you want to boot into Linux or into Windows.

best,
Werner

a similar problem
 

(maybe it's just me)
I have s similar problem where I have:

Winxp installed on sta, Mandriva 2007 installed on hda, and trying to install FC6 on hdb. I have set the boot priority to primary slave on the Hard drive in the BIOS setup. No boot loader was present in hdb after the installing FC6.

as someone without any linux background, here are my questions:
1)if I do a fresh install of FC6 on hdb with the other drives unplugged, how do I edit the boot loader config on hda so that it just loads mandriva? (it is installed with sta plugged in, so LILO has windows on the menu)
2)now how do I edit the Grub so that it includes the hda install of mandriva?

GRUB problem - Fixed
 

Hi again,

I have solved this problem thanks to an excellent tutorial that I've found on FedoraForum.org:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showpo...38&postcount=1

Now GRUB works fine and I have the dual-boot system that I need. By the way, after playing with it for several hours, I have to say Fedora Core 6 is absolutely wonderful. However, I can't understand why this odd installation problem with GRUB happens...

Thanks Werner for the suggestion on removing the Windows hard disk. I was about to try that when I found the tutorial above.

k61824, I'm pretty sure you can fix this problem in the same way.

In case somebody is interested, if you need to access the Windows NTFS volume from Fedora, as is my case, FC6 doesn't have core NTFS support. However, it's very easy to add this functionality with the ntfs-3g driver. To install it:

yum install ntfs-3g (as root)

See www.ntfs-3g.org for usage instructions.

Regards,
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Juan Conejero, Pleiades Software