Need expert help: Dual Booting Fedora Core 5 and Windows XP
 

Hi All,

I would appreciate if anyone out there can give me a hand. I have checked tons of threads with a similar topic to the one I'm submitting but I believe my problem is slightly different.
I thought I knew a lot about this stuff but I'm stuck!!! I've spent a weekend trying to fix it, but maybe I need a hand from the community ...

What I'm trying to do
I want to use GRUB to dual boot fedora core 5 and Windows XP. I am doing this on two separate hard drives. I have used this set up for about three years (first with RedHat9/WinXP and later with (FC2/WinXP) and never had any problems until now.

Summary of my setup
I have WinXP on a primary 120GB drive and FC5 on a 80GB secondary drive. GRUB is installed on the second drive. I configure my BIOS to boot of the second drive, load grub and then use the "map" commands in grub to virtually map the WinXP drive to look like the first (you know, map (hd0, hd1) e.t.c) so that It boots up. This has always worked.

My current problem ...
Fedora Core 5 Boots up fine. The problem is trying to boot WinXP. It starts booting OK, I get the Black Windows XP splash screen with the progress bar showing that it is loading. Then all of the sudden I end up with a blue screen of death. The error is along the lines of "STOP: 0x0000007E")
I then have no choice but to reboot. Booting up XP in Safe mode does work though ...

What I have tried thus far:
Believe me guys I've done my research on this one: I still have my old RedHat 9 installation on a separate hard drive, and when I use that drive and the Windows XP drive together (same setup as above) everything just works! That's why I think it is something wrong with FC5 or grub ...

I've tried:
- Upgrading my windows display adapter drivers
- Moving *.sys files from the windows installation to try to find if any of the drivers is causing the crash
- Using the Windows Verifier to check the drivers .. All the extra info I got was that some driver was triyng to use memory outside of that allocated for it (didn't say which)

Where I need your help:
* I Some people think it is a problem with Windows Drivers .. If this was the case, I would expect the Red Hat 9 installation to have the same problem, but it doesn't! Can anyone explain this?
* I can boot up XP in Safe mode, so I'm assuming GRUB is doing its job properly (or am I making the wrong assumption?)
* My Red Hat 9 installation uses GRUB 0.93, however FC5 uses GRUB 0.97. Does anyone think this is an issue? Should I consider using an older version of GRUB on FC5 (I don't know if that's possible?)
* This is the GRUB configuration I use for my XP installation. Is there anything else I could try?

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

* Finally, I have read that FC5 has some issue with nvidia drivers (or used to). Now I understand that it is mostly related to X and linux gui (which all works fine for me), but is there any chance that GRUB looks at those drivers or something before WinXP starts loading (I know I'm grasping for straws now but that's all I've got at this stage :(

* Any other advise? Please help, I really want to move from RedHat9 to FC5 but this is the last obstacle in the way (Unfortunately I'lve got family that needs to use the XP installation). I've already got a kickass FC5 setup but I've had to connect and disconnect the cable all this time to get back into windows ....

Thanks in advance

I think your problem lies with grub. I don't think it wants to hand over control to windows. If I remember your grub should contain some line that says table = /dev/hda (Since that is where your windows partition is)

I take it from this that XP boots fine if the second HDD is disconnected?

My first reaction was that perhaps this is a windows driver issue... (blue screen of death; can only boot in "safe" mode) your observations seem to negate this. (Fine as dual boot with older RH9, fine as a solo boot through windows bootloader.)

The thing is, once windows is starting, GRUB has nothing more to do with it. Same with X and Fedora. As you'd expect.

The process of elimination would appear to go like this:

The problem reads exactly like a faulty windows driver.

Cannot be fedora: fedora isn't running.
Cannot be grub: (XP starts to boot).
Not XP + win bootloader - successful.

The only thing remaining is the change of hardware - since a successful XP boot requires that you remove the fedora drive (either booting from the XP drive or from the RH9 drive). So your problem is likely to be a faulty XP driver that lives (for some reason) in the fedora drive (perhaps some sort of record?)

If you have grub installed to the mbr, you may want to try reinstalling - possibly to a regular partition instead. Fixing the mbr on the second drive. But this is a guess... AFAIK: XP shouldn't be using the fedora drive for anything, since grub has remapped the drives.

[QUOTE=Simon Bridge]I take it from this that XP boots fine if the second HDD is disconnected?

Thanks for the quick responses. To boot WinXP I always boot off the Red Hat 9 drive. I think I have booted it stand alone before, but that would require me going into the bios and making it boot off the WinXP drive ...

One thing I forgot to mention .. When I installed FC5, the windows XP drive was disconnected. Once I had FC5 up and running, I edited my grub.conf to add the windows entry, and then ran "grub-install /dev/hdb" (i.e reinstall grub to the second hard disk (linux). I believe this installs it to the MBR but since that drive only has linux I'm ok with that.

I've read you can install grub to the /boot partition instead ... anyone know how I can do that?

I've also read some people editing boot.ini in windows to do dual booting but I've never had to do anything like that in the past and not too keen on it unless I have to ...

I agree with Simon Bridge - grub has done it's bit.
Are the two grub.conf files in agreement - particularly the rootnoverify ???. I'd be suspecting you are hitting the wrong partition.

Mmmm ... two grub.conf files? I thought there was only one under /boot/grub/grub.conf ... in my distro /boot/grub/menu.lst is a symlink to grub.conf ... any other files I should be checking?

I just remembered I had to edit the device.map file manually to add the entry for the Windows XP drive:

(hd0) /dev/hda
(hd1) /dev/hdb # added manually


but that didn't help. Doing a df I get this:

/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
71G 7.5G 60G 12% /
/dev/hda1 97M 9.7M 83M 11% /boot
tmpfs 505M 0 505M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hdb7 24G 5.9G 19G 25% /mnt/windows

maybe I'm blind but I can't see any mistakes with this? I don't konw what the /dev/mapper stuff is I guess it's new in FC5?

Thanks again ...

Here is the output of that df again (a little formatting goes a long way :)

[HTML]
<pre>
df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
71G 7.5G 60G 12% /
/dev/hda1 97M 9.7M 83M 11% /boot
tmpfs 505M 0 505M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hdb7 24G 5.9G 19G 25% /mnt/windows
</pre>[/HTML]

i think your problem is WHEN YOU CHANGE THE BIOS...Dont change the BIOS...just use FDISK and change the STATUS OF BOOTING....Make the second drive bootable by PUTTING "A" on it to make that drive bootable.

Compare the one that works (RH9) with the one that doesn't (FC5).
Adds up to two where I come from ...:D

Hi aLL,

It took me days to fix this issue, but I've finally fixed it. Thanks to all for your suggestions above.

In the end I had to reinstall Windows XP to fix this because the drivers in it were all screwed up after installing Service Pack 2 which I had done a few days before.

I thought I should come in here and clarify that neither Linux, Fedora 5 or GRUB were at fault as I originally thought. Once I realised that it was Win XP screwing up, I spent days trying to fix it and after hundreds of blue screens of death for all sorts of reasons, in the end the best solution was just to start from scratch. Luckily, I expected this from XP so I never had any of my data on the C partition and didn't loose anything, just had to reinstall some programs.

Once I reinstalled Win XP, GRUB was dual booting Fedora 5 and XP just fine. The funny thing was that in trying to fix all this I mistakenly deleted grub from the MBR and then couldn't boot into linux. But all I had to do was use the Linux CD, use linux rescue and re-install GRUB in the MBR again and I was up and running in 10 minutes again in linux. Compare that to 10 days of dicking around in windows and still not being able to fix it.

Anyway just thought I should comment on how I had to fix this issue and stress that Linux did all it was supposed to do and works marvelously ... it's Win XP that's crap ...

Case Closed.