RH9, winXP dual boot - not bootloader screen
 

hi all,
i have a sony vaio pcg-grx550.

i have windows xp pre-installed. i installed RH9. installation was smooth.

linux is in a 5GB partition created using partition magic 8, at the end of my hard drive.

the problem is, it does not show the bootloader screen. it directly boots into XP.

i do not have a floppy drive yet.

thank you very much for your time.

cheers

Did you install lilo or grub on the mbr? RHAT should have done that during the install unless you said you don't wanna, or the default was somthing else.
Boot to linux with the boot cdrom, there should be an option to boot an installed system, instead of beginning a new install. So boot your system and at the command prompt as root do "/sbin/lilo -v -b /dev/hda" IF you have lilo installed. If you use grub, issue a command to put it on the mbr. I'm not familiar with grub, but just get a grub-howto from the net.

Some factory installations of operating systems have this problem. I don't have a solid explanation for you, but with my HP laptop the bootloader could not function until I removed HP's utility (that has its own partition). My symptoms were the same as yours.