In no way will you lose your win XP (unless you play with partitions with fdisk did that once, regreted it later)

However, we should be able to help you get your System back on track. A guru just offered his help. I will contribute as much of my humble knowledge I can.

We will save you from reinstall and leaving linux

I can see the error why your win XP won't boot. It gets to Empty partition. Try to change in grub.conf under Win XP to

rootnoverify (hd0,0)

This will get you to the ntfs partition (presumably you have your windows there).

rootnoverify (hd0,3) = /dev/hda4
rootnoverify (hd0,0) = /dev/hda1

I believe the other one is where you want to get when booting to win xp. So just change it according to my previous post.

And also post your BIOS boot order. IT seems like you have hd0 as boot in BIOS and you have grub on hd1 or vice versa.

So should default=2 instead of 1 or zero. BIOS order is Floppy, CDROM, IDE. I do not know how to tell it to use the secondary slave ide drive instead of the primary master ide drive. Of course I am assuming that ide in the BIOS means the first hard drive it finds.

BTW, I just remembered why I had (hd0,3). On 5/16 I posted:

"I played around with rootnoverify since I saw hda4 from fdisk -l."

It does not work for any of them.

IDE goes for master harddisk. Which is /dev/hda in linux. or hd0 in GRUB. The order in grub has nothing to do with it (default = 0,1,2 or whatever). The only thing that is important is that GRUB is installed on /dev/hda. How do you get to windows? If you do get to windows.

Right now, no windows access. Even fixmbr does not help. I have lost all access to my windows. I can only get to the c drive by using the windows cd. Can I copy some file there that will help with the boot?

I will reinstall windows without formatting and see if I can at least get windows with ide boot and linux on floppy boot. If that works, that will be half the battle. I still want to dual boot with no floppy, I hate the floppy speed and want to set my BIOS to no floppy

Tell me what happens when you boot. (I can't get to windows) What exactly happens?

Not exactly sure, thats why messing with the MBR isn't usually a good idea unless you know what you're doing.
Anyway try this first, boot into Linux with your floppy, remove the bogus hda4 entry using fdisk(or cfdisk, whichever you like), set hda1 to active(ie boot), reboot, make sure hda is the first boot device in bios, and see what happens. Don't worry about GRUB for now.

My windows dlls are shot. I used the Win CD to reinstall on the same drive w/o formatting but the dlls are lost. I have to reinstall all my programs again, a pain. Since I have to do that, I decided to format my hard drive with FAT32 so that Linux can see it. Now I do not know how to mount it since it says not found in fstab or mtab.

I have a fresh XP install. then I installed Fedora Core 1 without the boot loader option. Here is my fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hdd: 80.0 GB, 80026329600 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdd1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/hdd2 14 9664 77521657+ 83 Linux
/dev/hdd3 9665 9729 522112+ 82 Linux swap

Disk /dev/hda: 20.4 GB, 20411080704 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2481 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 2480 19920568+ c Win95 FAT32 (LBA)

No grub.conf since I chose no boot loader option.

What is next?

Thanks.

Mounting is easy.

su
<your root password here>

mkdir /mnt/directory_name_of_your_choice
mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/directory_name_of_your_choice

Or if you want to mount it automatically at boot, just edit your /etc/fstab file with correct line.

Take an example from your floppy or other lines in fstab file.

Hello marghorp.

I figured that out last night while looking at some google search. Now, I just need to make it mounted all the time. I think since I did not umount when I reboot, it is remembering it in /etc/mtab. Please correct me if I am wrong.

I had started another thread asking if somebody else had a distro suggestion that wouyd be simpler but I am finding that Fedora Core is what I want and like, since they all give me the same problem. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=182933 is turning to become the same discussion as this one and Demonbane is replying there.

So, please allow me to thank you for all your support and let us just keep to one thread and you and I go there from here.

So you are like me. I was searching for a simple distro, but all the time I wnated Fedora. And I stick to fedora and discover that it is a simple distro. The only thing bothering me is that FC 2 doesn't make my mouse work. Been living for two days without a mouse now

Ok to your problem. Mounting a partition can be done by fstab or the mount command. I don't think that mtab will still have it mounted after reboot. However, you can do a simple test. Mount, reboot, and then see if it is mounted. I believe it won't be.

For it to be auto mounted at boot, you have to put a line into /etc/fstab file.

A line in fstab looks like this

/dev/hda1 /mnt/some_directory ntfs defaults 0 0

Check out the fstab file and you will get the idea. Or you can check http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/
for details on automounting, just search a little there on how to mount ntfs. Disregard the ntfs driver if you have it already or if you are running kernel 2.6.x

Good luck. Did you get GRUB working. Try to install it. Have some courage. It will pay off eventually

Still working on this. I am using smart boot manager to try to boot.

I need to run updates but it has been going on for 13 hours+ through the gui. yum -y upgrade when all the way through but the red ! shows 119 updates available. yum -y update does not respond, or it is responding slower than my patience. I believe it is due to heavy traffic on Red Hat servers.

Is there a mirror site? How do I tell yum to use it instead.

I believe editing the yum.conf file in your /etc folder. How, I don't know, as I don't use yum. Have only used it to upgrade KDE to 3.2.2 but that failed as it ran out of fallback servers. Bummer.