Dual Booting windows
 

I'm a windows guy and am very interested in learning linux. I currently have my hard drive partioned into 5 pieces, winxp, winxp 64-bit, 2 storage partitions and my linux partion.

I installed fedora core 5 and relized that I no longer have the option to boot windows. I knew I should have paid more attention during the install but everything seemed ok.

What I want to do is have the option to boot all 3 of my OS's at startup. Right now it sends me to fedora without any prompting.

I am not familiar with the terminal commands and this makes me pretty much helpless at this point.

Please someone tell me linux did not overwrite my MBR and that there is some simple way to re-enable the windows boot?

That's the problem linux will work the best with 4 primary partitions, you can make as many extended partitions you want but only 4 primary.

The MBR has only 512 bytes.

Every PC operating system can restore its own MBR, including Windows and Linux of course.

You can use a Dos floppy to restore the MBR for the entire MS family OS, although officially the advice is to use the installation CD.

You can boot both your Windows Xp and Xp64, say they are in hda1 and hda2 partitions respectively, by adding (or ensuring) these lines in the file /boot/grub/menu.lst of the Linux if it uses Grub as the boot loader
My guess is you should be using Xp to dual boot Xp64 and that should remain operative.

If your Linux uses Lilo lest us know.

You need to edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst with an editor while inside Linux and log in as root, say using the editor "vi". The command is just
If you have installed the OS successfully then you can boot all of them using a boot loader from any of the OS. However Linux is much easier to work with.

The 5 piece partitions are OK as you must have some of them in logical partitions.

I'll try this out and let you know about the results.
I'm not sure when I'll be able to get to it however, I woke up sick this morning.

Thanks for the help everyone :)

I ended up going and opening /boot/grub/menu.lst and added this before the fedora boot.

title XP in hda1
root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

I also changed the timeout form 5 to 30seconds.
Now when I and waiting for the timout I can choose between linux and windows. If I choose windows I get the usual dual boot between Xp and Xp64bit.

It may not be exactly what I was supposed to do but it works!

Like I mentioned earlier I expect your XP dual booting XP64 because that is the only way XP64 could co-exist with its own kind. The necessary booting files for XP64 would have been installed inside XP and not XP64 and so XP64 was not installed "independently" and must be booted via XP.

Have you installed XP64 "independently" then the instructions I gave in Post #3 would be able to boot both seaparately.

Windows boot loader is light years behind Linux. It can therefore boot itself up first, then your XP's NTLRD and from there proceeds to XP or XP64.

I am a new user of Linux . I am using Mandrake 10.0. I am very eager to learn this system because I have heard that although there are more things to remember, that it is also a very stable system once it gets going so I hope that with the help of other I could at least become a mini-Linux guru within this next year with the help of others and then I will be able to teach some of my friends also.
My first problem in this system is that when I fire up the computer that it hangs for atleast 4 minutes. I restarted and watched the booting sequence and it stops at this point;

Bringing up interface ethO:
Determing IP address for ethO:
Determing IP address for ethO FAILED

Right now I'm not sure where to go at this point to correct the problem, I've come to a wall here as I'm not sure where to go.The work enviorenment is much different that Windows. Could someone suggest some hints to me? I would truely appreciate it.
My system is; Intel {R}
Pentium [R] 4 CPU 1500MHz
1.51 GHz
256MB Ram

If eth0 failed, it means Mandrake doesn't recognise the internet connection. To answer your question, the we need to know what exactly is the internet connection you are using.
Linux has trouble with some windows-type modems for dial-up internet, and can only connect through an ethernet card, not usb port for broadband/adsl.
I suspect this is tthe problem-you need to get a separate ethernet card and install it in one of the spare pci slots.

Petern2 is right.

eth0 is just network card as far as I am aware and your Mandrake should work normally but possibly no network connection and no Internet.

Network connection is not a booting problem as we are discussing on this thread. You should start a new thread. My advice is to install a few more systems to see a common pattern if your network connection can be recognised. Mandriva took over Mandrake for a while and so sticking with older distros will not help either.

The card I'm using is a synnex 0210 card. I have another one that is RTL8139803182T1 that I have for a spare.I am in Taiwan so we use hinet as a connection.