Hi there, I've got 2 hard disks, a 80gb disk(SATA)[5 partitions in it], and a 40gb disk(IDE)[two partitions in it].
windows XP is installed on the first drive-80gb[first partition], and im trying to install Fedora 8 on the other-40gb[first partition].

During the installation i've chosen to install GRUB in the first sector of the boot sector of that second drive. Also I've added the first partition of the first disc (where i've XP) in the GRUB boot menu and chosen XP as the default OS. Now when i restarted my pc it directly loads XP without showing the OS Choices menu. Can anyone please suggest me what to do now in this stage? Thanks for any reply.

Keep hitting the escape after starting your machine. It will ask you for a boot device. Select your second harddisk. It will then load grub. If that works configure your system to boot from second harddisk.

You need to tell your BIOS to boot from the 2nd drive. Depending on the BIOS you have, you might need to hit the Esc key during boot as ekamlesh says, or maybe Del or one of the F1-F12 keys. Most systems will have a splash screen that appears before XP starts booting that will tell you which key to press.

thanks for the reply guys. I've changed the boot order to load from the disk where linux is installed. Now I get this message while loading XP:

Booting 'WinXP'
rootnoverify (hda1,0)
chainloader +1


then no activities after showing this message. What should I do now? Thanks for any reply.

Try changing that line to rootnoverify (hd1,0). grub names partitions differently from what you'll find in /dev. hd1 is the 2nd hard drive, 0 is the first partition on the drive. Typing info grub at a terminal should give you the full info on how grub names partitions.

If you are booting Windows from the second boot drive, you would also need to add the mapping lines in your Grub entry:
Windows doesn't normally like to be booted off of anything but the first drive in the BIOS boot order, so if you try to boot Windows on a different boot drive like you are doing, you have to use Grub's "mapping" technique to fool Windows into thinking it is actually being booted from the first boot drive. How about giving that a shot and let us know how it goes.

It seems there is a misunderstanding as regards to where Windows XP is installed.What I understood from murtaza 78's first post is ,
hard disk 1(80GB)
5 partitions
Windows on the first partition

hard disk 2(40GB)
2 partitions
Fedora on the first partition
Hence I think
should work

That is only true if he has Grub installed to the MBR of the Windows drive and boots the Windows drive on start up, because only then is the Windows drive (hd0). But he said in his post that:
So if he boots his Fedora drive first on start up, that makes the Fedora drive (hd0) and then the Windows drive would have to be (hd1), or the 2nd drive in the BIOS boot order, if he doesn't have any other drives. Grub on start up sees the order of drives as the same as the BIOS boot order, not how the drives are ordered in /dev (sda, sdb, sdc, etc) once you boot into Linux. So although the drive order in Linux generally stays the same, you can change the boot order on start up, and that will change (hd0), (hd1), (hd2), etc.

Hi CJS,

your method of using Grub's "mapping" technique to fool Windows worked perfectly. Thanks a lot for letting me know the technique :-).

Glad to hear that worked OK, murtaza_78; cheers and have fun with Windows and Fedora.