installed Fedora core 3 and now windows XP can't boot

kiljoix · 10-13-2005, 06:33 PM

I have just installed Fedora Core 3 on my Dell 8250 on an additional 250GB hard drive (hd1) and it seems that not only does Linux not recognize the pre-existing Windows XP OS (on hd0) in the start up mode where you should be able to toggle up and down to pick which OS to boot, but if I disable the Linux hard drive in the BIOS and boot from the windows hard drive alone I get only a black screen with GRUB in white letters in the top left corner. During the installation I was careful to exclude the windows hard drive from the install yet I suppose some part of the boot loader was added on to it anyhow. When I view the hard drives and partitions in Linux, however, the windows hard drive appears unaltered with a primary FAT32 partition (that's DELL utilities) and the remaining ntfs partition for XP.

I suppose that I need to either configure Linux to give me the Windows XP boot option or uninstall and try again. My only concern is that I am not left with one empty hard drive and one that will still only give me a black screen that says GRUB.

thanks for your help.

chemdawg · 10-13-2005, 06:39 PM

Gee, that sounds like a blessing to me!

If you use KDE, go to the control center, or configure, or whatever FC3 has to manage boot. Then, look to see if windows is listed there. If it isn't you can add it. Just be sure to specify the partition. It should be something like /dev/hda0 or the like. After that, you just reboot and you should be able to toggle to windows at the boot screen.

kiljoix · 10-13-2005, 10:52 PM

I looked all through the control center in KDE but didn't see anything that would allow me to configure my boot options, I also have gnome if you know any way to configure the boot with it.

init100 · 10-15-2005, 06:17 AM

Quote:

I have just installed Fedora Core 3 on my Dell 8250 on an additional 250GB hard drive (hd1) and it seems that not only does Linux not recognize the pre-existing Windows XP OS (on hd0) in the start up mode where you should be able to toggle up and down to pick which OS to boot, but if I disable the Linux hard drive in the BIOS and boot from the windows hard drive alone I get only a black screen with GRUB in white letters in the top left corner.

I have exactly the same setup on the computer I write this from, although I run FC4. I had a lot of problems getting both to boot, but solved the problem after some digging around. The problem might be that Windows cannot boot from the second harddrive. You must trick Windows into believing that it is still on the first drive. This is my entry for Windows XP in /boot/grub/grub.conf:

Code:

title Windows XP
	rootnoverify (hd1,0)
	map (hd0) (hd1)
	map (hd1) (hd0)
	chainloader +1

Hope that this helps.

syg00 · 10-15-2005, 06:46 AM

No, it seems Windows is indeed on the primary drive.

Quote:

. During the installation I was careful to exclude the windows hard drive from the install

If you de-selected the tick-box for Windows during the install, *you* told FC3 not to include it in the boot menu - at least, that's how I recall Redhat used to work. Add the following to the end of menu.lst, rather than that posted by init100

Code:

title Windows XP
	rootnoverify (hd0,1)
	chainloader +1

pippo · 10-15-2005, 06:57 AM

I am not sure I have understood correctly. So you have a disk with windows and you installed linux on another hard drive while 'ignoring' the windows disk.

Here is a guess. The MBR was written at the beginning of the windows disk but the file grub.conf (which is read at startup) is on the linux drive. You can't boot windows probably because grub.conf is not correct. If disable the linux disk, grub tries to start according to what it found in the mbr but it can't because he want to read the grub.conf which is on the other disk.

If you give us details about you config (fstab and grub.conf), we can tell you what to put in grub.conf. The simplest thing is just to edit the file.

init100 · 10-15-2005, 10:53 AM

If you enable both disks, what happens? Do you get a Grub menu? If not, do you get a Grub prompt? If not, what do you get? This will help us know where to begin.

If you get a menu, but you can only boot Linux, then there is probably an entry missing for Windows in grub.conf. Then you can add an an entry like the one that syg00 mentioned. Did you know that you can manually enter the commands to boot you computer at the Grub prompt? This means that before you add an entry to grub.conf, you can boot your computer and manually type in the lines in the grub.conf entry you want to try. If you get a menu, just type 'c' (without the quotes) to get to the Grub command prompt. From the Grub prompt, you can try:

Code:

rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1
boot

and see if it works. This should boot you into Windows. If this does not work, try (again at the Grub prompt):

Code:

rootnoverify (hd0,1)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
chainloader +1
boot

kiljoix · 10-24-2005, 05:42 PM

Well it worked as far as adding Windows XP to the boot list and initilizing the boot but XP itself is having issues. Apparently it can't find autochk which causes a fatal error.
Not too worried about it but thanks for the help, now at least I understand more about GRUB.

patrick