dear friends,

i have a cpu with p5pe-vm asus motherboad and intel pentium D processor. It has a 80Gbyte primary hardisk in which a windows OS is setup. I also attached as secondary drive a 30Gbyte HD from my previous cpu in which a fedora core 5 OS was installed. i like to have dual boot system one for windows and the other for linux. what i did was

1. change the boot sequence so that booting start with the cdrom with fedora core 5 1st disk in it.

2. the installation proceeded asking for upgrade of the searched fedora in the secondary dirive

3. a boot sector was also asked and in which i place in hda1. after that the upgrading continued wherein only the fist cd of fedora core 5 installation was used.

when it rebooted windows automatically showed up without the usual choice between fedora and other system.

i tried to change the bios setup and change the boot sequence to secondary drive instead of the primary.

i got this problem. error 18: selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by bios

what i want is that there should be a dual booting system wherein the computer once opened the usual gui which asked the user between choices of systems
either windows or linux is shown.

what should be the problem with my installation.

thanks for any help on this matter.

Can you boot from the menu if you don't change the boot device in BIOS?

This indicates that you installed the grub bootloader for Fedora to the root partition. For the grub bootloader to work, showing you both windows and Fedora, you need to install grub to the MBR (Master Boot Record).

Instead of installing grub to /dev/hda1, it should be /dev/hda (without the partition number). The first part of grub will be written to the MBR, and the remainder in the /boot directory of the installation.

dear friends,

thanks for your concern. i think you are right. i noticed when i opened my newly delivered cpu that the drive where linux was formerly installed was a secondary drive and not a slave drive.

what i did was to get a linux live cd knoppix 5.0 and copied all my linux file to the primary drive. After which i change and make the linux drive a slave drive by switching the belts and reinstalled linux in said slave with booting at MBR of the primary drive.

that solved the problem.

thanks again.