Dual Booting troubles
 

I have two physical drives, hda and hdb. hda has Windows XP installed on it and I have been trying to get Fedora Core 5 going on hdb. As far as I'm aware the installation has gone alright, I'm just having a few problems setting up the boot system.

First I tried leaving the GRUB settings as defaults, (I might have changed the default hdd to load to hda instead of hdb), but when I start up my system I don't get any options to choose which O/S to load, it just loads Windows straight away. Changing the boot settings in BIOS to boot hdb first brings up the error msg "cannot load OS" or something along those lines.

So I reinstalled FC5 with different boot settings (can't remember which exactly), and then on system load it brings up "GRUB _ " with the underscore flashing as if waiting for some input, although it did not respond to anything I typed.

I played around with the settings a few times, but those were the only two scenarios that occured.

If anyone knows the right settings I need to use, or can point out what I'm doing wrong I would be very appreciative.

Cheers

You should be able to boot the FC CD1, and enter "linux rescue" (no quotes). Then you should get an option to recover the boot-loader.
Install it to MBR of /dev/hda (probably).
This time take a note of what you do, and what the results are.

typing "linux rescue" takes me to a shell (after asking for language, keyboard layout and whether to start the network port or not). I didn't see any options to recover the boot-loader, if there are commands I can use from the shell that would be nice.

I did a re-install again of FC5, this time I didn't change I thing, it asked what hard drives I would like to use for the installation and both hda and hdb were ticked, and how I would like to format it, format all linux partitions was selected, and install GRUB to MBR of hda was selected. Yet still when I rebooted after installation it just loaded Windows XP straight up with no option for booting FC5.

Seems to be a pretty common problem.

Have a look at

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=439864

OK! well I got FC5 to boot up now and bring up the menu of O/S's, but now windows refuses to boot. I've tried using various different settings as shown in the suggested thread above, but each time I select Windows XP from the grub menu it displays the windows part of the grub.conf file and prints out an error, such as, error 8: kernel must be active before booting (or something to that extent), or even prints out grub.conf and does nothing. Does anyone know what exact settings I need in my grub.conf file? Keeping in mind I have Windows installed on hda and FC5 on hdb. I assumed it would be this:

title Start Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
map (hd1) (hd0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
makeactive
chainloader +1
boot

but that produces, Error 13: Invalid or Unsupported executable format

cheers