Dual Boot - Windows XP and FC4
 

I recently installed FC4 on a second disk drive. Windows XP resides on the first disk drive by itself. I followed the FC4 install and chose to install GRUB on the MBR. After successful installation, I rebooted the system as requested. I never received the GRUB menu to select which OS to boot. It went directly into booting Windows XP. Why?
I then booted from the linux rescue CD and ran grub-install to place GRUB on the second disk drive with Linux FC4. I changed the BIOS boot order to place the second drive before the first drive in the process.
I rebooted and received the GRUB menu with both the FC4 and XP options to boot. If I select the FC4 option , it starts to boot and I receive the following msg 'Error 17 - Cannot mount selected partition'. If I select the XP option, it starts to boot and then I receive the following msg 'Error 13 - Invalid or unsupported executable format'.
I am using a boot partition as noted in the grub.conf. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. :scratch:

As always, Google.

Put grub back in the promary disk. Go to Fedora, and add following to the grub configuration:
Where in (hd0,0) the hd0 is the first disk in the PC, and the second 0 represents the parttition number. e.g. partition 2 on the first disk would be (hd0,1).

You may also need to increase the "timeout" settings.

That's not very helpful - the OP already said the (initial) primary disk just boots to XP.
I'd suspect your grub.conf has the disks the wrong way round now you are booting the Linux disk. First up I'd try putting the disks back and re-installing grub to the MBR of the XP disk. It obviously didn't work the first time.

If you still have problems post your grub.conf, map file if you have one, and the output of "fdisk -l" (that's ell, as in list).

Dual Boot - Windows XP and FC4
 

I changed my BIOS settings back to booting from the first drive first and then the second drive. I tried to install GRUB on the MBR of the first drive with this command:

grub-install /dev/hda

I received the following message:

"/dev/hdb1 does not have any corresponding BIOS drive"

How do I capture the output of the commands

cat grub.conf
fdisl -l

so I can post it to this thread.

All help is greatly appreciated. :scratch:

You should be able to use the FC4 CD to boot into your installed FC system on the hard-disk. As I don't do FC, I can't help there.

Another option is Knoppix - runs entirely from the CD, won't touch your disk, and has great hardware detection.
Go get a copy and boot that - it will be able to see all your partitions, and will allow you to connect to the net as well.
Well worthwhile always keeping a copy handy.

Knoppix
 

I was able to get Knoppix running successfully. Thanks for the advice.

I then opened the terminal program (shell) to issue the requested commands
and this is what I received:


knoppix@1[knoppix]$ cat grub.conf
cat: grub.conf: No such file or directory
knoppix@1[knoppix]$ fdisk -l
Cannot open /dev/hda
Cannot open /dev/hdb
knoppix@1[knoppix]$ fdisk -l
Cannot open /dev/hda
Cannot open /dev/hdb
knoppix@1[knoppix]$ fdisk

Usage: fdisk [-l] [-b SSZ] [-u] device
E.g.: fdisk /dev/hda (for the first IDE disk)
or: fdisk /dev/sdc (for the third SCSI disk)
or: fdisk /dev/eda (for the first PS/2 ESDI drive)
or: fdisk /dev/rd/c0d0 or: fdisk /dev/ida/c0d0 (for RAID devices)
...

All help is greatly appreciated. :scratch:

im not sure how to fix this, but you might have done your install using lvm for partitioning, and i think that makes your grub configuratioins a bit different then they would be normally.

Partitions
 

I figured out how to logon as the root user. This is the output I received:


knoppix@1[knoppix]$ sudo su
root@1[knoppix]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 163.9 GB, 163928604672 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19929 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 19928 160071628+ 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/hdb: 163.9 GB, 163928604672 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19929 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/hdb2 14 19929 159975270 8e Linux LVM

All help is greatly appreciated. :D

Resolution
 

I reinstalled FC4 and then issued the following commands to
resolve the bootloader problem:

chroot mnt/sysimage
grub-install --recheck /dev/hda

Thanks for all your help.:D