Changing the Boot Loader in FC7
 

Hi Buddies,
I first installed Fedora core 7 on my Sata Hard Disk...and Then installed Windows Media Centre on same hard disk but on different partition...Unfortunately I can't boot into Fedora Core 7....Hence I want to Change the Boot Loader so that I can dual boot into either Windows Media Centre or Fedora Core 7.....Any idea of accomplishing this task......

Sure, follow the guide below:
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/howto-...sta-linux.html

@Junior Hacker
I know this method and have successfully implemented it many times...But this time its not working...Actually map of My SATA hard-disk is as follows:
1.] I have ONE Primary partition on which Windows Media Centre is installed.
2.] Rest of the hard-disk comprises of Extended Partition in which there are many logical partitions and out of them One is for SWAP and over one Fedora Core 7 is installed (EXT3).
3.] Apart from these two partitions my SATA hard-disk has few NTFS and FAT32 partitions as well in the EXTENDED area.

When I use the method suggested by you, it shows know "No Linux Partition Found!" and asks to "Reboot".

Another option is to boot into Fedora with the disk and get into a shell, type: fdisk -l to see the partition layout. If Fedora is in the fourth partition (/dev/sda4), then you could go into a grub session and tell grub where the boot files are in / and where to install the boot loader with these four commands as root:
Not sure if this can be done from a terminal from the disk, can't see why not if you can't boot into Fedora.

It kinda sounds like when you installed Windows, Windows re-wrote the partition table in the MBR and only it's partition is listed. But if fdisk -l sees the other partitions, then they should be listed in the MBR.

On a somewhat related note, I've allocated my 500GB drive into two 80GB ext3 partitions, one 80GB NTFS partition, and the rest of the disk space is intended for data storage and is formatted as ext3. I have FC7 installed on the first 80GB ext3 partition and would like to try installing different distros (such as Ubuntu for starters) onto the second 80GB ext3 partition but I'm somewhat fearful that Ubuntu (or whatever distro I try to install) will wipe out my existing MBR that loads Grub for FC7 (as I understand it). Has anyone tried installing multiple Linux distros on separate partitions on the same hard drive?

The thing that bothers me is that since all of the partitions have mount points in FC7, and even if the install goes Ok I might still end up with multiple system directories like /,/etc,/dev,/var,...etc. I just bought myself a brand new "Quiet PC" with Ubuntu PRE-INSTALLED (it was a joy to have some other choice besides Windows!) with a dual core AMD64, 4GBs RAM, 500GB HD, and 2 one GIGABIT ethernet controllers.

I've played around with Linux in the past, but I'm finally trying to dump Windos altogether and get enough essential applications working in Linux (whichever distribution I end up with, probably FC7) that I can finally abandon Windos altogether. For me however, the essential applications are things like the Maple programming language, Altera's Verilog design tools, and I'm still hoping there is a better program editor than either vi or Emacs (ie; something with a nice GUI interface, syntax highlighting, column mode and hex editing, etc), not to mention being able to play DVD movies,... but those are all topics for another thread. At the moment I'm just looking around the forum to see if any of my questions have already been answered. The Linux manuals I have just seem to cover basic system administration, but never seem to touch upon what I need - for example, a direct ethernet connection between the FC7 machine and another machine running either Windows2000 or Ubuntu (dual boot system), when both of them are also connected to the same router. Ah, but I need to slow down and take things one step at a time. I would be daring and just go ahead and try stuff because as Junior Hacker's Sig says, "Go for it, you can always just re-install", but I've put enough work into the configuration of my existing FC7 installation that I'd really hate to have to repeat it all.... again,...and again. But I'm starting to ramble - it's a prerogative of my age group.. ;)

Many people dual boot, quad boot etc., during installation at the boot loader stage of any Linux distribution, you are asked where to put the boot loader. Normally the distribution has the MBR preselected and will add the previously installed systems to the boot menu, but if you prefer to use the boot loader already in the MBR from another distribution as the Master boot loader (best scenario with Fedora pre-installed), you have the choice of installing the boot loader to the first sector of the / partition or /boot partition if you created one, then add that distribution to Fedora's boot loader configuration.
The best way to avoid surprises after an installation is to use a partition tool prior to installation like Gparted and make the partitions for your new installation, then during installation at the partition stage you select "use existing partitions", or "custom partitioning", depending on what choices you are given. Then highlight a partition you make for it and give it a mount point and tell it what file system to format it.
All Linux distributions have the partitioning tools included and at the partitioning stage you again select "custom partitioning" and select free space and create the size you want, mount point and file system type.
The more times you reinstall a Linux system, the less times you cruise forums looking for answers and the less paranoid you become.

Oh I've installed and re-installed several distributions, but haven't tried installing two different versions of Linux on one machine (much less on the same hard drive). I do normally always use custom partioning and although I have used Gparted before, I did the partitioning I mentioned earlier during the installation of FC7. I should have tried installing a second distro before I spent much time configuring my existing FC7 installation and then it wouldn't have mattered much even if the original installation did get clobbered. I guess my next task should be to practice tarring/gzipping and restoring a full Linux installation so I won't be so paranoid in the future. I was also thinking of trying something called "Ghost4Linux." If I could squeeze another question here, how do most people backup their Linux systems to avoid a complete reinstall of the OS plus applications, etc?

I'm always told to just use something like "tar -czf" to save the root filesystem, but doing that from within a running virtual memory system makes me nervous - not to mention trying to restore such an image from a LiveCD or something.

There are many ways, but I think the best would be to use dd to get an exact bit for bit image and pipe it to gzip or bzip2 into another partition like /home if you have a separate /home partition. Can even be piped to an ntfs partition if you have ntfs-3g installed and configured to give read/write access to ntfs. Fedora 7 has ntfs-3g as a core package and can be installed during initial installation.
I use a commercial boot loader called bootitng which creates it's own partitions, up to 254 primary partitions on one drive, it can resize partitions, slide partitions, wipe and secure wipe partitions, and can make compressed images of partitions. My Fedora 7 takes up about 5.5GB of it's 10GB partition and the image is 1.5GB in size, it can be restored anywhere on the drive, and as many copies as you like at the same time. /home is part of my / on all 5 Linux systems I have on this one drive as I use a shared ntfs data partition for all seven systems which include two Windows XP, swap is also shared and is the only partition that must remain in the same spot, the root partitions can be moved around. Images made with open source solutions must be restored in the same spot on the drive.
Bootitng has 30 trial, it cost $35.00 US if you like it, but is worth every dime. It only takes 8 minutes for me to wipe out a bad 10GB Linux partition with zeros and make a new partition in it's place and restore the image of the fresh updated installation of the system.
dd can be as fast once you know the steps required and got your commands right, but you have to restore it in the same spot, and I believe it can image from within the running operating system you are imaging. Bootitng is a GUI application used in a dos environment outside of any OS.

Yes indeed, never even considered DD but the more I use Linux the more useful it seems to be. :-) If bootitng runs Ok on my system w/o too much hassle, I don't mind shelling out $35 for something that's going to make my life easier, even if it isn't the preferred Open Source. For that same reason I'll probably spend $30 to get a copy of Nero for Linux just because trying to round up all the different Open Source packages to do the equivalent things is just too much hassle if I can avoid it for a reasonable cost.

The same applies to hardware purchases. I learned right away that the very first thing to look for when buying any new hardware other than plain Vanilla stuff, is to try to find something that has Linux drivers. In fact, one of the next things I'm going to be looking for here and/or elsewhere is a list of hardware vendors that have been approved for use with Linux/BSD, because I think if we all tried to purchase from Linux friendly vendors there might be more of them. A year or so ago I purchased an HDTV HD-3000 video card from www.pcHDTV.com solely because it was made specifically for Linux and was sold with Linux drivers (including GPL'd source code I believe) and without Windows drivers, har, har! Now I can finally plug it in and start using it. :)

P.S.
I would probably be willing to pay up to $400 for a mouse driver that would let me use the side buttons of my Logitech mouse. Know anywhere I can get one? That's the single thing I miss most about moving to Linux - not having all the functionality of my Logitech mice.