Hi, I have an Athlon 3000 64 Processor based pc with gigabyte GA-K8NSC-939 F8 MB, 512K Ram , Nvidia 5200 Card and my HDD's are IDE

I am trying to install fedora 5 ( i've tryed both the 32bit& 64bit DVDs) I checked the DVDs before continuing with the installations..

I am installing Fedora 5 on the second IDE HDD on my PC (a 20GB HDD).

Everything appears to go OK,I boot from thr DVD, I select install Fedora on the second HDD and follow all the way through the set up. It detects mt Graphics card and installs. When I get to the Grub Screen I change the defaut so that windows is to be the default, it says other and i modify the text to "windows"(so as not to confuse the family) and the system appears to install. It asks for a reebot.

On reboot there is no GRUB options and we go straight into windows.

when I re boot from the DVD the system detects Fedora and asks if I want to upgrade or re-install, so it's there, but when I attempt to change GRUB the system says it cannot detect any boot loader and asks me if I want to install, so I go through the whole process again and install the GRUB boot loader on dev/hda, the system then continues for a bit before I get the message

"No Kernal packages were installed on your system. Your boot loader configuration will not be changed"

Aghhhhhhh

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks for your time

After reading your post several times, I beleive I know what happened.

During the installation of Fedora, you arrive at a point at which you must decide where to install grub: MBR or root partition. Either you don't know what MBR refers to, and it's impact on grub installation, or, you don't fully understand the impact of installing grub to the root partition. Or you installed grub to the MBR of the second HDD instead of the first. Can't say for certain because I can't see the commands/choices you made, or the contents of /boot/grub/grub.conf (or menu.lst in some distros).

The fact that you can boot Fedora from the HDD via installation DVD suggests that you elected to install grub to the root partition. That's whay it isn't working as expected.

At this point, you have several options.

A) Re-install Fedora and elect to install grub to the MBR (www.google.com/linux to do research on the whys and wherefores of installing to MBR vs root partition). www.gnu.org documentation (the grub manual) is the document to read.

B) Find the Fedora instructions on how to make a boot diskette/cd/dvd to use whenever you want to boot Fedora, or see the grub menu giving you the choice of which OS to boot.

C) While Fedora is up and running, re-install grub (instructions in the grub manual).

hey i have got some solution for u which might work.
boot from the first cd. instead os pressing enter at prompt. type linux rescue... go through the process but dont select n/w... when the shell prompt comes up. type

chroot /mnt/sysimage

grub-install /dev/hda

reboot

ur problem would be solved

sharma, thanks but I have already tryed this ater reading other forums..

when i type grub-install/dev/hda

i get the reply sbin/grub:not found

so i am thinking that either grub hasn't been installed or it's been installed in the wrong place.

Thanks bigrigdrive your quote "Can't say for certain because I can't see the commands/choices you made, or the contents of /boot/grub/grub.conf (or menu.lst in some distros)."

where can i access this so i can print it out / copy it onto this forum

thanks

Are you, by any chance, trying to run grub-install as normal user? This error message is typical because /sbin isn't in the users' path; it is in the root users' path.

Su to root, then run grub-install.

thanks bigrigdriver...
so I go into fc5 rescue and get to the command prompt and type chroot /mnt/sysimage, there is a pause and the command line comes back

I then type grub-install /dev/hda..and get the reply

"dev/hdb1 dose not have any corresponding BIOS driver"

Also I have tryed to swap the boot order in bios from disk 1 to disk 2, but then i get the message "error loading OS"
so i swapped the order back.

But the FC5 DVD says that Fedore is there, I will not be beaten, however I'm now totally losthttp://images.linuxquestions.org/questions/images/smilies/confused.gif

thanks bigrigdriver...
so I go into fc5 rescue and get to the command prompt and type chroot /mnt/sysimage, there is a pause and the command line comes back

I then type grub-install /dev/hda..and get the reply

"dev/hdb1 dose not have any corresponding BIOS driver"

Also I have tryed to swap the boot order in bios from disk 1 to disk 2, but then i get the message "error loading OS"
so i swapped the order back.

But the FC5 DVD says that Fedore is there, I will not be beaten, however I'm now totally lost