Hi,

I am trying to install Linux on hp DV8305uS AMD64. I have a second hard drive installed into the laptop on which i want to load Fedora. Here is the Layout of both the drives in the laptop

hda - Primary

Partition 1(NTFS) - Windows Media Center ~ 60GB
PArtition 2(FAT32) - Formatted the HP recovery drive to FAT32 using windows format tool. so that both and windows can commonly share this drive. - 13GB
Partition 3 - Not sure but assume that hp has it in there for Auto Play,etc ~ 1GB

hdb - Secondary

Partition 1(NTFS) - Drive from another laptop which has Windows. ~ 27GB

Partition 2(Had previous Redhat 9 installation) ~ 10GB

This is how i planned on installing Fedora6. I created the required partitions manually in Partition 2 of
Secondary drive hdb(After 27GB)

/ - ext3 6GB 27GB - 33GB
/home - ext3 2GB .....
swap 1GB .....

In the installation options I set up in such a way that the grub loader is in hda taking control over the MBR

I succesfully installed everything and after restarting I was all excited to see the grub loader which allows me to select which OS should I load and by default it takes me to Windows XP as I have set it.

But when I try to bring up Fedora that is when I ran into problems, brings up some of the interfaces at startup and before even going to the X-windows it restarts the Laptop.

So here I am posting a question about what could possibly wrong. I doubt if it has something to do with Fedora to have root / in the first 100MB partition of the harddrive. OR it has something to do with the trying to install in secondary HD.

Any suggestions??

Thanks,
Raghu

The only advice at this time that I have is to possibly (at the VERY least), place the /boot partition on /dev/hda. I only recommend this, unless you set the SECOND hard drive to master and the FIRST to slave. The reason for this, I believe, is that the computer needs to know which one to look at or whatever to boot, and all. If there are no switches or nothing of the sort needs to be done, then (carefully):

(1) prepare one of the partitions on the FIRST (/dev/hda) PRIMARY (hda1 through hda4) disk drive. Set that partition to bootable, and format it as /boot.
(2) set the /root or / partition up as you desire.
(3) MAKE SURE THE FIRST (/dev/hda) PRIMARY (hda1...hda4) DRIVE SELECTED AS /boot PARTITION IS TO BE PREPARED AND MARKED BOOTABLE! Windows I do not believe will care, because it has its own mess to make of itself.

I only recommend these due to the fact that I have run a version of Linux where it was set up to boot on the FIRST (/dev/hda) SECONDARY (hda5...) partition. Actually, I have always had only one hard drive in my laptop, but it may not be able to boot off of secondary partitions.

I am uncertain if, but I do hope that, this helps.

Hey Thanks for the reply

I Finally was able to solve it and succesfully load the new version of Fedora and still leaving my Windows XP untouched. Here is the story

As my explanation goes I have the Fedora core installed on second drive and had the GRUB Overwrite the MBR in HDA/Primary Drive.

When I actually installed the Fedora in second drive I opted for Linux to automatically do the partitions on the second drive, which it did using the LVM. I opted the option of installing grub on hda.I dont know if Grub has a problem supporting LVM or they have a bug(Read some where that Grub Ver 0.97 have some bugs especially the one I had) but it didnt work.

So that didnt work either.

Now I manually created the required partion for Fedora with out LVM and had the grub installed on hda and it worked like a champ, Now I have both the latest Fedora 6 and Windows

Huryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!! ready for develpemnt on Linux

Njoy
Raghu