Hi,
I installed Fedora Core 4 to my computer'second drive, the first drive has XP on it. However, to my great disappointment, the GRUB menu never comes up, the computer just boot straight to XP.
After several more installations attempts and searching for help in the forum, I finally managed to add an extra line in the window boot.ini file, the extra line points to a file in my C drive, which is supposed to have a copy of the Linux boot sector. Now when I reboot, I am able to pick either Windows or Linux. However,when I pick Linux, it takes me to a blank screen with "GRUB" at the upper left corner, and a blinking cursor after that,
The installation process went fine, and GRUB was first installed on the MBR but since it has problem with dual boot, so now I had installed it in the first sector of the second drive, which is where /boot is.
Also how do I create a bootable floppy using the CD rescue mode? Perhaps I can at least boot to Linux.

Can someone please help me with this?

Thanks! Any help is much appreciated.


JH
Trying to get into the Linux kindergarten

Sounds like you have multiple issues. The problem you had the first time sounds like you installed grub onto the MBR of the second drive, but your BIOS was set to boot from the Windows drive. When you finally did install grub onto the first drive, it can't find your grub.conf or menu.lst because it's on the other drive.

1. So the first thing to try is to tell your BIOS to boot from your second drive. If that works, then you can edit your grub.conf and add your Windows as a section.

2. If that doesn't work, then you can try using the command map, to exchange BIOS drives virtually, like this:

grub> map (hd0) (hd1)
grub> map (hd1) (hd0)

then reboot

3. If that doesn't work, you can try manually booting linux from the grub shell. Then once you're in Linux you can reisntall grub with the root command to make sure it's looking in the right place for grub.conf. Assuming your kernel is located in /boot/vmlinuz:

grub> kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdc1
grub> boot

After much frustration, I finally reinstalled FC4 and boot successfully to Linux. One thing I learnt is the GRUB should be installed in \boot, which unfortunately was not a default in the installation. So I had to add this item to the list (in my case \hdb1\boot, which resides in the first sector of the second drive) in the GRUB installation screen during installation.

Thanks to all, for the help I found in the site.

JH