Hello everyone,

This is a very nice forum you have here,hope someone can help me out me out with a little problem that I had while tryong to install Fedora Core 2 in a system taht already had Windows XP Professional installed.

I had read about the bug inn the 2.6 kernel that changed the Disk Geometry of the Hd but thought I was well prepared to deal with it(apparently not since I'm here).I partitioned my hd using Partition Magic while still in my Windows world.I rebooted and started the install using the four cds that I downloaded but the installer froze when i reboted I had access to nothing.

Here is where I stand:

1.I have a printout of my HD's CHS values,number of cylinders,heads,sectors,etc that I got from Partition Info alittle program that comes bundled with Partition Magic.

2.I tried to use gpart from a Linux bootable cd(Version 3.3).It rescued my 3 partitions (2 NTFS,1 ext2) but only knoppix can access them.I still cannot but from windows.

The questions how can I use the info that i got from
Partition Info? fdisk won't let me specify CHS values.Or should I just get a whole lot of cd-rs and save my data and reinstall everything?What's your expert opinion people?

i would just re-start the linux install process.
are you sure the system froze ? sometimes its just working in the background.

are you saying windows doesnt boot anymore ? this is probably because the install process had gotten past the stage where it removes the windows boot loader, but had not finished installing or configureing GRUB (grand unified boot loader)

you can use knoppix to install grub and allow you to boot windows, or just re-try installing linux.

did you check the MD5sums after you downloaded the linux ISO's ?
corrupted downloads seems to the the number 1 cause of bad installs in my opinion.

I did check the checksum but i just right now did a check of the cd and It didn't pass,the cd itself seems to be bad.

You area right I should've tried to reinstall but i panicked and tried to fix the mbr by hand,by first erasing the whole partition table and try to re-enter it by hand,I probably could've done it but i don't know how to enter chs values in fdisk.

Here iis what fdisk -l has to say about my disk:

Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
240 heads, 63 sectors/track, 10337 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 15120 * 512 = 7741440 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 3366 25446928+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 3367 4720 10233216 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 4720 10338 42467824 7 HPFS/NTFS


If i try to change the number of heads to 255,cylinders to 9729,which rae the correct values, in the expert menu
fdisk -v tells me that:

Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
447 unallocated sectors

should i just do a back up of my data with knoppix and reinstall even though i now all my data is there?
I can even play all my music and view all my word documents!!