Hi im trying to get fedora core 2 dual boating with windows xp pro. I am trying to use the windows boot loader. I read some tutorals and this is what i ended up doing.
1.started fedora core 2 in rescue mode.
2.Cd /mnt/sysimage
3.chroot /mntsysimage
4.dd if=/dev/hdb1 of=/bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1
5.copied bootsect.lnx to floppy and booted back up into xp
6.copied bootsect.lnx to c:\
7.in ms-dos promt i did attrib -h -r -s boot.ini
8.I edited boot.ini with this line at the end C:BOOTSECT.LNX=”Linux”
9.added the attributes back to boot.ini then rebooted.

I get a prompt now when i load up with linux as another choice but when I choose it the computer just goes to a black screen with a blinking cursor in the top left corner. Some info about my disk. Windows is on the first hda drive that is 60gb and fedora core is on the hdb second drive that is roughly 8 gb hda1 takes up most of the disk where i installed fc2 whit hdb2 the rest being a swap. Hda is ntfs and hdb is ext3. I have read that ntfs will not load bootsect.lnx. Is that true? I've tried all morning and now im stuck. Any help would be appreciated.

What bootloader are you using for Linux? Will your boot floppy start Linux? Where is /boot on hdb?

Have you tried forcing LBA32 on the Linux bootloader?

1. When i installed fc2 i did not install a bootloader because i had another linux distro on the first drive that used grub so i was going to add an entry to grub to load fc2. (When I installed XP i deleted all the partitions on the first drive cuz i wasn't going to use that distro anymore.)
2. I created a bootdisk that loaded fc2 (im in it right now)
3. Im not sure where boot is. This is the result of df:

[jeff@x1-6-00-10-b5-f4-57-ac jeff]$ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hdb1 7218432 2201752 4650000 33% /
none 128568 0 128568 0% /dev/shm
/dev/fd0 1430 1366 65 96% /mnt/flop

so im assuming it is on /dev/hdb1.

4. I don't know what LBA32 is so no i have not tried forcing it on the boot loader.

From this I infer that the floppy you constructed will not boot your Linux distro.

You have to have a linux boot loader, and you are trying to get the Windows boot loader to transfer control to the Linux boot loader.

Your black screen with cursor basically comes about because you have succeeded in getting the Windows boot loader to transfer control to what should be the Linux loader, but nothing is there. Consequently, the system halts.

I don't use fc2 so I am not sure how this works in that distro, but you should have a bootable CDROM or a bootable floppy that will access your distro CDROM and bring up a running Linux installation that can access your hdb information, mount the partition on hdb, etc. Use this facility to install grub or lilo on hdb. After you do that, then repeat the procedure you originally detailed to cause the Windows boot loader to pass control to the linux boot loader.

The LBA32 thing has to do with how disk drives and BIOSes store/read data off of a hard drive. Older BIOSes read using a cylinder, head, sector address organization and it works out that they can only read drives up to 1024 cylinders. Hence the entire OS that is accessed by the BIOS must be in the first 1024 cylinders. With newer and much larger hard drives this is a problem, so the modern addressing scheme is based on a Linear Block Address (get it?) scheme, with a 32 bit address available. Drives ordinarily will handle the translation, but with some BIOSes and boot loaders you have to explicitly tell the boot loader to use the LBA32 scheme.

Well the bootdisk i mad does boot into fc2. And when i do
whereis grub
it says it is in /sbin/. So maybe i need to do /sbin/grub-install and tell it where to install?

edit: Most of the grub howtos i am reading describe installing it to the MBR. Is it possible to install it without having to install in the MBR?

I misread your first post and for some reason thought that the bootblock that you copied to the floppy had been copied to the floppy in order to make the floppy a boot disk for your linux installation, rather than to just transfer the bootblock to the C:\ drive.

Evidently you have another boot floppy for linux (as you should).

Yes, installing grub is what you want to do. You don't need to install it to the hda MBR; in fact, you don't want to do this if you want to boot using the Windows bootloader.

So instead, install it to the hdb MBR. Then follow the procedure you followed earlier to extract the hdb MBR and copy it to the C:\ drive and you should be fine.

This gives you the capability to boot off of either disk, if you need to, by just changing the boot device in BIOS. You actually could set grub to chainload the windows bootloader so if you boot off of hdb you get the grub menu and can choose windows, and if you boot off of hda you get the windows boot loader menu and can choose linux.

Hey! Why not?

Personally, I just boot with grub. My MBR is on sda. My ntldr is on sda1, but the Windows installation is on sdb1. My Linux boot partition is on sdc5, and I have a mishmash of ext3, NTFS, and FAT partitions scattered around on drives sda through sdd. The reason for the mess is historical; the system "just growed", but it all works fine. I do have to comment that when I install a Mandrake upgrade, the installer always gets confused about how my system boots, and I always have to manually patch things up.

I have Ubuntu installed on sda1 and my old Windows XP drive is now sdb with one NTFS partition (sdb1).

I'm using GRUB to boot Ubuntu.

I can't seem to get GRUB to boot the Windows XP! If I disconnect the drive with Ubuntu and GRUB (moving the Windows drive to sda) then Windows will boot fine on it's own. But when GRUB tries to boot it as sdb, here's what I see on-screen:

And the boot process just stops dead right there.

Any suggestions?

-Zak

Okay, I found an answer thanks to some help in #ubuntu on Freenode.

I added this:And now it works.

-Zak