Hi!

I have two Maxtor Hard drives in my computer. 120 GB(Primary master) and 40 GB(Primary slave) .
I tried to install WinXP to 120GB(worked out great) and then Linux Fedora Core 2(automatic partitioning on empty space) on the other 40GB HD. OK, I installed also GRUB bootloader in the beginning of 120GB HD.

When all was finished, I rebooted my computer. GRUB loaded ok, Fedora Core 2 worked OK, but when I choosed WinXP from GRUB I got message on the screen, that was something like this:

"dev/hda
chainloader 1+ " (?)

and loading WinXP stopped.
When I installed that Fedora 2 I got a warning that other OS(WinXP..) partitioning table was created incorrectly and some bootloaders may stop working(can be repaired afterwards).

I really didn't know what to do.
I tried to reinstall GRUB but it didn't help.


I tried to reinstall WinXP, but it didn't help..

So what should I try next?

Thanks guys...

Hi and welcome to LQ!

I hope you can fix your problem with this workaround. It's a bug in FC2.

Cheers, Boby!

don't bother with reading all those workarounds, just change your read/write mode for the first hard drive to LBA. Funny that all these work arounds exist that are pages long and its so simple to fix this problem.

Thanks! That really helped!
May I ask what I did? I mean, the option was "auto" in Bios... So what this "LBA" means?

Thanks a lot!

OK so I had that problem too...well what to do. what no ones pointed out to you is this.. FC2 does not ship with its NTFS driver active since I was told it was a little unstable.

The point being is this its over written your MBR master boot record now FC2 without its NTFS driver cant see NTFS drives or whats on them unless its over a network i.e a Microsoft network.. I'm doing this right now and its working I can see and write to NTFS drives. Now I've put FC2 and XP on independent drives which I loaded independently too..into one puter but one with XP was disconnected from the one I was using to load FC2 I'm not so sure grub will see xp no matter what driver the core has.

If you have XP pro you can boot from the disk and do a MBR repair...also if you made a Floppy repair in pro as backup you can use that. Home does not have this facility it only has the repair consol. You could find that your XP home console if thats what you have is unable to recognize the drive in which case you will be seeing disk read errors. even if you reload. I know this occurs...!!! It happened to me. I used pro but didn't make the floppy repair disk...

There is only one way round this if you wish to use XP after this if you get someone to download a wipe utility called BCwipe and install in on their computer and copy the dos part of the program from the programs file to floppy there's a read me file with it follow the instructions to securely wipe the disk ...it will remove the corrupted MBR and you'll have your drive back.

If not your a full time Fedora user so get used to it. All the clever work rounds in the world wont save you if you have read errors.. however you can reclaim your HD. and start from scratch.

Wow, did you even read what I posted? All you have to do, even with fedora is to change your read/write mode to LBA! Its simple, effective, and it really makes me wonder why everyone tries to make it hard on themselves by doing these crazy things to try and get it to work when its so simple!

If I could have done what you said in your post at the time I'd have done it, but disk read errors after trying to rescue my XP then then FC2 that what your saying is not always applicable. And if it were there wouldn't be so many having so many varied problems at boot.. I think getting disk read errors is quite proof enough of that..

And secondly there are many here that wont have a clue what you mean being new users unless you describe it in detail the process you went thru to change LBA step by step. you may also notice people have had varying success with all these fixes whats worked for one doesn't always mean it will work for another.

So instead of writing wow did you read; how about wow this is how I did it in a step by step so that everyone can follow it and replicate it and don't assume any previous knowledge on the part of the readers. to do that makes posts like yours pointless to all but those that know and have done and don't need to know; why do you think there are so many repeats of the same questions???..so if your going to help or know something that will help, you have to assume "NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE".. have a nice day honey and lets hear a more positive wow next time...lol

i don't use wow as much as i should on these forums. so much misinformation going around its not funny. If you have an error after installing linux you can also use the hard drive fix to correct the bootloader error. Its not hard to change your hard drive read/write in your bios. simply select the hard drive you want to fix, and depending on your bios you should be able to click it or hit enter on it. then find where it says read/write mode, and however your bios invokes the change, sometimes hitting enter, clicking or using +/- to change the mode to LBA instead of auto.

kittykaat: Actually I installed FC2 with W2K Pro on my laptop and it worked fine. So, I don't think that it's a NTFS issue.

KohlyKohl

I have added your suggestion to the grub howto
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...41#post1208741