Installing Fedora w/ Winxp
 

Nice to meet everyone, I have been reading this post for a couple of weeks before i registered and would like to say it's a great information tool.

I'm running:

pentium 4 2.26
seagate 73g scsi = winxp on this one for now
maxtor 38g IDE = trying to put fedora
512mb rambus mem

I am a newbie to linux so please bare with me.

I am trying to run a dual boot system. Winxp is installed and fedora instalation works fine.. when it comes time to choose what OS to use i click on windows it comes up saying something along the lines of unable to find files. I currently was using the grub booter, am thinking about switching to partition 8. THis has happened 3 times already tried different things each time still no go. Have yet to try partition to see if it works...

Can anyone help or would it be better for me to install one more time and actually right down what the error is this time?

thanx all for help sorry about long post

Welcome to LQ.

I'm not sure that reinstalling will do much good - it just sounds like a configuration issue.

Perhaps you can give us some more details:
1) Exactly what the error is
2) Post a copy of your grub configuration file "grub.conf"
3) A listing of your partitions (the output of "fdisk -l" should do it)

see thats where i screwed up. I fdisked everything and reinstalled windows to get back on the internet on this computer. I will reinstall fedora to get the error to post.

stupid me just has to get my laptop from work to use. ;)

do a search on this site, or google "dual boot xp and linux" and you will find a wealth of how to's that will guide you thru the process. it has been a while since I last did it, but for many installations it will not work "out of the box" without tweaking your grub config file, or your boot.ini, etc

http://www.overclockersclub.com/guid..._fedora_xp.php

or straight from the horses mouth:

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l...-dualboot.html

yea i checked out both of those websites and followed both of them.. I'm gonna install it here again in about 20 min... i put the fedora cd1 in and the screen was all white... my cd went bad so im almost done redownloading again... ill post the error hopefully tonight if not tommorow.

I can only laugh about it :)

ty all for help

ok i got it... the error is

rootnoverify
chainloader +1
_


sorry all for your time this was my error and I found alot of posts on the site ty for all the help

I did a cursor search on your error message, and it doesnt seem to be one of the common dual boot "known issue" that come up often.

perhaps you should circumvent grub and reinstall the windows boot loader (boot to windows cd, choose recover console, then enter the command FIXMBR), then edit your boot.ini file in the root of your windows drive to recognize the linux install (again, lots of tutorial out there on that,,, google). as a workaround of course....

Hi,

I have the same exact project, and no matter that I followed the instructions I found at overclockersclub and reinstalled my Fedora, it still doesn't work. The info I found out there is mostly for people that are Linux experts, which I am not. I can use it and configure some things, but I cannot make it dual boot.

Did you get it working?

I tried fixing the master boot record, and now my computer says "no operating system"

So, I guess that's not a good solution. I hope celticX didn't try it. :-)

Now I'm reinstalling my Windows.

Thats not good no I haven't gotten around to that yet. I tried to reinstall linux again and now it goes through the loader sequence and once it comes up to the GUI the screen goes white. I thought the disc went bad so i redownloaded and burnt new ones still the screen goes white. dl red hat and same thing... not a good way to start off i guess..

i know there is a know issue with ati cards. Im using a msi 4600ti/vsd 128m ram

this is where I'm at now:

finally installed has to use boot=lowres

windows still won't load but linux will

when loading windows error:
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1


so i tried the sr on xp and tried fixmbr that crashed my computer also and now am getting message Error loading os

tried to boot directly from the hard drive that windows was on and recieved error message NTLDR missing


i also was reading something about how i have my scsi id=0 that might not work when running a dual boot system w/ linux and xp on a 2 hd system with one being ide and one scsi.. does this sound like it could be anything?

also i believe my scsi id was like shda1 would i need to change
rootnoverify to rootnoverify (shda1,0)

Ok. I got it working. Reinstalled Linux from scratch. Instead of allowing Linux to make automatic partitioning, we made it manually. Removed the partitions and took it from the open space.

I have them on one hard drive, though, just different partitions. But it's working beautifully.

I don't know about SCSI, but but make sure you set grub (boot loader) properly.

Good luck and let me know how it goes.

yea i just repartitioned my main scsi into 3 parts 32g ntfs for xp 32 for linux and 5 for fat32 to switch files.. then i turned my ide into another ntfs for more space for windows.... i went through installed linux and now windows boots fine... im just unable to open linux now.....

i created the boot disk and the boot disk comes up timing out when loading vmlinuz or a work along those lines and asks to replace disks.... i put main boot record in the /boot partition... linux wanted to put it in my ide partition.. should i allow that? or let it save it to my MBR on the scsi? i was also thinking about deleting the linux install and setting up partition magic as my boot loader would that be another idea to try out to see if it now will load linux

Hey guys,

I too just went from dual booting (Winxp & Suse 9.0) to tri-booting (add Fedora C2T3) and it broke grub. After mounting my suse partition in fedora it seems that Suse wasn't using the rootnoverify on the windows drive ... just removed the noverify and it seems to work great!!! Hope this helps!

Kleedrac