Hi all,
I purchased a 120GB Seagate SATA harddrive and installed Windows XP and FC6 on it. Below is my partition info.
sda1-xp
sda2- /
sda5- D:
sda6- E:
sda7- swap
sda8- /home

sda4- free(not formatted)

I first installed xp. Then when I booted from my FC6 cd it said my memory is not sufficient(256MB DDR400) and so I've to use text mode.
1. I partitioned as above and installed GRUB on the first sector of the boot partition instead of on MBR.
2. In the dual-boot option kept FC6 as default OS(* mark besides FC6). I edited the names 'other' as 'Windows XP' and 'Fedora Core' as 'Fedora Core 6'

Installation went smoothly-it even congratulated me on successful installation?! But when I rebooted the system it neighter shows the options for choosing xp/FC6 nor boots into FC6 by default. It just boots into xp.

What can be done about it?

I had this problem too, with FC4. I would recomend moving the / partition to be the first partition on the HD. you can use gparted for that.

What happened to me, was the MBR H0RK3D onme, and the computer would just boot off the first partition. rather than struggling getting GRUB into the MBR, I just let it boot from the first partition.

note: I would also recomend that you put the /boot directory in its own partition, but that's just me.

Hi Steve,
I read that Windows should always be put in the first partition of the first drive.

Let me add another information here just in case it helps you:
I donot know why or how to use Gparted or Partition magic. I had first created only C drive and once in xp I went to computer management and created another primary partition but I neither assigned a drive letter to it nor did I format it. Yet when I was installing FC it showed this partition(sda2) as FAT16 type and I formated it to ext3.
Likewise I created an extended partition and created D and E drives. During FC installation I created swap and /home in this extended partition and formated as swap and ext3 respectively.
Just wondering if this is the correct method? If no, is this method the culprit or it just doesnot have any effect?

yes. it looks like problem is that your computer is booting off the first partition. that's why you want the boot loader to be in the first partition.

Steve,
I installed GRUB on the MBR itself and allowed GRUB to take care of booting instead of NTLDR. Its working fine.

But I have a new problem. I am not able to go to GUI. I'm automatically taken to text mode and 'startx' gives a blank screen. Any help. I've posted this as a seperate post.

Regards,
SV.