need help on installing boot loader/manager
 

Ok, I am going to try to be as detailed as possible, so bear with me.

Right now I have XP installed on the primary master (hda) and FC3 on the slave (hdb)

I have det up the BIOS to boot from hdb first, so I can leave hda's MBR alone and just change the boot order in the BIOS if something goes wrong.

When fedora was installing it wanted to put grub in hda, and I couldn't find an option anywhere to change that, so i did something and "changed the boot order" from the installer to get it to go into hdb. I can load FC3 fine, but XP doesn't load, I get the hang after the rootnoverify message.

It could be the fact that changing the boot order in order to get fedora to insall into MBR of hdb I found that there is a system.map that links hda to hd1 and hdb to hd0, so the grub.conf file reads as hd1,0 for the part to boot XP. I tried changing the two files so that hda was hd0 and the corresponding entries in grub.conf and menu.lst because I heard that xp wants to be on the primary drive, which it is, but since grub was loading hd1,0 maybe it thought it was on the slave, I don't know. Anyway that made grub go crazy and not work anymore at all. Good thing it wasn't in the MBR of hda...

Apparently either grub doesn't like windows xp, or something weird, I dunno.


So my plans are now install the bootloader on the root partition and use some other loader inplace of grub.

The best thing I have come across is smart boot manager. I installed it on a floppy and it allowed me to boot windows, but it doesn't see the linux partition. I also want to install it to the mbr of hdb, not hda, and i don't know it this is possible.

So my options are this as I see things:

1) Try again to install smart boot manager to the mbr of hdb and get it to recognize the linux partitions

2) Install grub to the mbr of hda (Do NOT want to do this)

3) Try to use lilo on hdb (I've never had a problem with a similar setup and LILO. Slackware,etc)

4) Use some other boot manager installed to MBR of hdb.

If anyone knows of another way to get fc3 to install bootloader to hdb or even better to use LILO (I didn't see any options to that effect) I'd love to know :)

So, thanks for reading all of that, and does anyone have any suggestons on what to do? I'm getting stumped :confused:

did you try LILO??

I didn't see an option to use LILO when installing FC3, i could have missed it though, maybe someone could point it out to me.

I've never installed a bootloader from linux or anywhere else besides what the installer did automatically for me when I was setting it up.

I am going to need to reinstall Fedora either way I believe, so if there is only grub available can I then download LILO and install it over grub?

You don't need to reinstall FC3 just for lilo! Just make the /etc/lilo.conf file (much simpler than grub's config file) and run /sbin/lilo.

So I guess I would need to first install LILO, as grub is already in the MBR and I don't have /sbin/lilo. Then I would create the lilo.conf, and run the lilo command to install it into the mbr.

I thought that I would need to reinstall FC3 to fix grub, but instead I remembered that I had a live cd and used that to mount the fedora partition and fix the grub.conf/menu.lst files and I can boot into FC3 fine again. Still no luck for getting it to boot windows though. I still think it has something to do with win thinking that it is not on the first hd. I'm going to try the map command to map (hd0) (hd1) and see if that helps.

I also used ultimate boot cd and tried smart boot manager (it didn't see the linux drive) and GAG (it installed to MBR of hda, which i didn't want).

Success!!!

Aparently even though windows WAS on the primary master, grub had a device.map file for hd1 to be hda. I guess windows thought it was on the slave even though it wasn't?

Anyway, using map (hd1) (hd0) and map (hd0) (hd1) before the rootnoverify(hd1,0) seems to make it work. I didn't think to use the commands because in other posts they were used when win was the slave, which was not so in my case....