Fedora 11 install on Vista Dual Boot fails to load back Vista
 

Hey,
I was pretty confident when I did this. But at the end was perplexed and ended up googling and now into forums as my last resort. :(

I had Windows Vista installed on my Dell XPS 1330 laptop and installed Fedora 11 through USB-Net install method. Install went fine, grub loaded fine but then, when I chose Others to boot Windows I got -
NO BOOTMGR FOUND - PRESS CTRL+ALT+DEL TO REBOOT !

Googling for this suggested me to try the Windows Install CD to REPAIR MY WINDOWS INSTALL. But the problem was, when I chose the option to Reapair the OS, it listed no windows install.

But I am able to access my windows directories through Fedora. But not able to boot through window (obvious because I do not have the BOOTMGR).

Any help on this is appreciated. I can provide more inouts as and when asked.

Thanks,
Abi

Which partition did you make primary? Windows is very jealous so if you try to make it a secondary partition, you can fry it.

I am sure, I did not make Windows to become secondary. It was left to be primary and I installed Fedora on the freespace unallocated space I shrunk from the original drive which had windows installed on it.

give us the output of(as root)and contents of /boot/grub/grub.conf

Oops !! I do not have my laptop with me right now. :( If you could suggest me what needs to be checked, I can check for them once I go back home. :(

in your menu.lst you can find an entry for windows..it should probably look like
the above piece of code means that my windows is located in /dev/sda2 and it will chainload the windows bootloader to start the windows.. so you should check the value X in (hd0,X)

edit:menu.lst means grub.conf

Perfect, so from what I understand, I should first do a fdisk -l and find which partition has the windows partition.

Then put in the corresponding partition in the hd0,X where X replaces the partition number. Will try this tonight and let you know.

if windows is installed in /dev/sdan (n an integer).. then you should use (hd0,n-1) not (hd0,n)..hope u got it..

Now I got it, its even more clear .... :)

Thanks a lot dude .. will try and let you know ... If this works I will be saving 4 horus from reinstalling my laptop and another 2 hours for the crap to install updates and all :(

Fingers Crossed !!!

good luck.. :)

As a general question, before installing I had Ubuntu 9.04. I could use the Windows Boot Manager instead of GRUB to boot into Ubuntu. So even uninstalling it was not all a problem too.

But looks like, there is not option to stop GRUB from overwirting the Windows Boot Manager when I install Fedora. I mean, we need to have this flexibility to choose our boot loader betwrrn - GRUB and Windows Boot Manager.

Because, I was aware of this problem and was very cautious when I did the install but still ran into this problem. :(

I would be very surprised if that is the case. I haven't installed Fedora for several years so this may be true? Usually, when installing a Linux distribution the bootloader is the last thing installed and if you are using a GUI to install, there should be an Advanced tab that allows you to choose where to install Grub.

Windows does not give you this option.

There is an option to choose the partition to load the GRUB, and I did choose the partition whre I had installed Fedora, KEEPING IN MIND I SHOULD NOT REMOVE WINDOWS BOOT MANAGER... But boom, I got shot.

Infact I tRied my install twice, first time, I said DO NOT INSTALL ANY BOOT LOADER, because I guessed then windows Boot Manager would have the Control. Then I ended up not being to reboot either Vista or Fedora .....

From what it looks like, once you install Fedora 11 (atleast), your WINDOWS BOOT MANAGER IS WIPPED OFF !!! :(

You are given that option.


Fedora (and several other distributions) tell you where grub will be placed. By default, the Fedora installer selects grub to be placed in the MBR of your first hard drive. You can instead change it to be the MBR of another hard drive or the first few blocks of a partition.



edit:
I guess I had this thread opened too long. Your post didn't appear until after I sent mine. My bad.

What ever, I could not see the option to load the GRUB in a place apart from the Windows Boot Manager. Or better said, GRUB Overwrote WBM even though I chose to install GRUB on the first segment of the partition where I installed Fedora.

When I could do this with Ubuntu, I even tried in Fedora. But did not work.

The only way Grub would overwrite information of your windows bootloader on the windows partition is if the person installing chose that partition. Grub doesn't actually boot windows, it just points to the area on the partition windows is on where its boot files should be.

If you chose to install Grub to the partition where Fedora was installed then Grub would not boot because it would have no stage1 file in the master boot record.

If you select do not install bootloader with your Fedora install, you will then need to manually edit vista boot files to make an entry for Fedora. Also, Fedora does not put an entry for windows in the menu.lst file, as far as I know, and you need to do this manually. It's easier than the vista method but, if you are a long time windows user, you may be better off using vista bootloader. There is a program called EasyBCD (free download) from neosmart technologies which people have had success with.

Worked Worked Worked !!! :)

This was what I did, as suggested the (hd0,x) in the /etc/grub.conf file was pointing to different partition than the partition on which the boot files of Windows were loaded. So I changed the value to the correct as per suggested by mobinskariya and it worked. :)

Thanks a million for your responses guys :) Now I know how it works .

I did try the EasyBCD software yesterday and I actually used it to uninstall Ubunt 9.04 from my laptop.
But in this case of Fedora 11 - Vista, since GRUB was the boot loader, when I tried to use BCD to rewrite the MBR for Vista, it did not even open EasyBCD application and it said, COULD NOT FIND A ACTIVE BCD FOR YOUR WINDOWS. SO FAILED TO OPEN. (This was because there was no Windows Boot Manager and EasyBCD only works if there is an existing Windows Boot Manager).
So, I had to use the Windows Restore Boot Loader tutorial to restore back the MBR with Windows Boot Loader from the Vista DVD and all worked.:)
Thanks for your reply :)

thats great..thank your grub since it helped you learn something :D

congrats.. :)

Perfect !!! It worked :) As you said, the value of n in hd(0,n-1) was wrong. I fixed it and now all booted fine. Infact I have remove Fedora 11 and going to try Open Solaris for a try :)

Thanks a lot:)

Be careful with OpenSolaris. You have to do a lot of chain loading to be able to boot different operating systems, including Linux, when running grub off OpenSolaris. Double check me on this, but I think installing grub on OpenSolaris is also different from the way it's done in Linux, although everything is pretty much done for you by the OpenSolaris installer. Also, menu.lst isn't located in /boot/grub in OpenSolaris.

If you could post a link which atleast gives me a heads up before I even try this, then it would be great.

BTB, thanks for your help.

Here's what I found from a quick search on LQ.

triple boot linux, winxp, opensolaris - info from LQ


I'm sure there is better info with a more careful search.