I have 2 hard drives. One has two copies of XP on it, and they dual boot fine. Now i just stuck another hard drive in and installed fedora core 5 and left it with all default boot manager settings..i didn't really pay attention where it installed to, but it did install grub. My problem now is that when i boot i only get my normal XP boot options. Grub is nowhere to be found, so I have no way of getting into linux and configuring grub.

anyone have any suggestions or help?

If you can't see boot.ini

Start>run notepad boot.ini

post the contents of that file and I'll make it so it will boot right. You can copy and paste the new one in place from my follow up post. Or, if you can follow this:

copy and paste a line under [operating systems]. It doesn't matter which one. So, now you have 3 os lines. There are four numbers in parentheses. Change the last two to (1) (1) Change the path to /boot/grub. Change what is in quotes to Fedora 5. Remove /fastdetect. You might have to mess around with the path a little. Like you might have to specifiy /boot/grub/menu.lst, or you might need to use backslashes. But, now there will be a Fedora 5 option in the MS Windows boot menu.

well i messed around with that, and i think my problem may lie in where i put grub. In the installation i put grub in the first sector of the second hard drive. Should it be there or in the mbr?

If you can't configure c:\boot.ini to give you the grub menu, you can also reinstall grub and put it in the MBR. Both will work. It's usually alot easier, if MS Windows is already taking up the whole first drive, to put an entry in boot.ini for linux. Did you ever get the grub screen to come up with the boot.ini approach? If you did, then you all you do is keep boot.ini the way that it works for option 3 to get you to the grub menu, but use the linux rescue mode to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst so where it says hd(0,0) it says hd(1,1). If you can't configure an option on the windows boot menu that gets you to the grub menu, then use the linux rescue mode to install grub to the MBR

MBR on the **FIRST** hard drive--or on a floppy.

OR--do it the way AwesomeMachine suggests...