I just noticed that GRUB was installed on my WinXP drive instead of my Linux drive. In fact, the whole /boot directory,resource, drive, whatever, was installed on my WinXP drive. I'm also guessing that it was installed over some of my normal WinXP files that are essential for booting. I already re-copied the ntldr and netdetect.com files from the XP CD back to the "C:" drive on my XP HDD but I still get the "System Disk" error when trying to boot from that drive instead of my Linux drive.

Strange though, I remember specifying that the bootloader (during the Red Installation) be placed on my hdb (used to be my Win98 HDD and is now my Linux HDD), however, I allowed the installer to automatically configure my drives for installation, and perhaps that's when it decided to place the /boot directory on my XP HDD.

I'm curious to know if Ryknow215 had the same scenario...

I'm also still curious to know exactly how the boot process works for Linux. Such as what point does it try and switch control from GRUB to a windows compononent? What do the command lines in GRUB mean? What file in Windows is it looking for to boot? Knowing the answers to those questions I'm sure will lead to a solution.

you can put your windows disk as master, remove the linux disk and boot form the windows CD to the rescue mode.
at the command prompt you could try
fixboot
fixmbr
after that it should work just fine. i mean revert back to your original master and slave settings

Wouldn't that screw up my linux boot though? I guess that will at least allow me to boot into Windows and get to all of my data, and then I can retry to load Linux with the correct boot options - I'm guessing I should leave off my Windows XP drive completely from the installation. My only wish is that I could somehow access the Windows drive while in Linux, but that's a different subject.

By the way, my Windows drive IS currently my master, and always has been.

Tried fixboot. Didn't work. Tried bootcfg /rebuild. Didn't work. Tried copying over the ntoskrnl.exe again from the CD. Didn't work. But now at least I get the NTLDR missing message. I'll keep hacking at it. I'm hesitant to try the fixmbr option because the warning message says I could kill access to all my partition (by screwing with the partition table) and I have a lot of data I'd like to still access (which I'm sure I'd still be able to do with a fresh install of XP.)

To be honest, i haven't messed around with the grub stuff in a while. I just got so frustrated that i didn't really care. So i put a brand new 120 GB hard drive in the master slot, set up XP on it, put my linux drive as secondary slave and book up linux via bootdisk. Otherwise, i boot into XP normally.

I tried to update grub through the fedora installation cd's but it said that no kernel packages were installed to my hdd so grub wasn't updated. if anybody knows how to get grub working w/o a reinstallation of fedora, that would be helpful .

Well, I seem to be having this exact same issue...

I have a Dell Dimension desktop like andymullins... I tried installing Mandrake 10 on my system before I tried Fedora, and its LILO bootloader worked perfectly on both OSs. Unfortunately, I could not get my sound card working. So I had to switch to Fedora.

Anyways. I currently have my Fedora drive as master, and my Win XP as slave.

I'm using the default settings that Fedora put in GRUB ( rootnoverify (hd1,0) chainloader +1 ) and no dice. I tried using "chainloader (hd0,1) +1" but that didn't work either...

I'm worried that I'm going to have to switch back to XP exclusively if I can't get it to boot up. Is anyone getting this problem on, say, Red Hat 9.1? I'm just desperately trying to make the switch to Linux, but this computer seems to have gremlins...

My issue dealt with Red Hat 9.1. I ended up just redoing the whole process on the same HDD. Installed Win XP first, then added Linux after on it's own partition (that Windows can't see). This required me to add the Linux.bin file to the C:\ and the boot.ini for Windows to allow GRUB to start from the NTLDR boot menu when first starting my machine. Works great now.

I tried a ton of things to get it to work the other way, but ended up screwing up my Windows MBR and having to reinstall Windows just to get at my data before redoing the whole thing from scratch.

I've been having the exact same problem as you guys with Red Hat 9.1

Having the same problem with Fedora Core 1

i've also been having the problem of booting windows from a second hard drive, but thanks to portal.suse.com, the following worked for me.

rootnoverify (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)

hope this helps

JSayK, that did it! Thankee very much.

JSayK,

THANKS! worked for me also!

Bambino