I just went through a week of nightmarish installs and went from Fedora 7 to 9 to Ubuntu back to Fedora 7 all the way to 10. Found the problem to be my terabyte drive wasn't being read correctly (lest I think that's the problem). Anyway I finally have a stable Fedora running and realized that I didn't install WindowsXP. Need XP to run Mathematica because it doesn't run on wine and and getting the Linux version will cost me another $1k. I found the following post that will probably help me,

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...l-boot-490164/

It points to the following page.

http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?t=144294

But the original answer pretained to Vista not XP. I'm a really big newb. Can someone point me in the right direction. I may not understand what they are talking about in the www.justlinux.com forum, but I can take directions pretty well and I've got a Linux in a Nutshell book, Augustin's Linux Manual, and a Bible (err linux bible).

I currently have Fedora 10 installed with all the updates. My filesystem is et3, with 2 partitions called sda1 and sda2. sda1 is I think my swap partition and sda2 is my '/' partition. But I'm not sure which is which. After the upteenth install I stopped writing the install info down. And I don't know the device name of my CD/DVD. I have two, one is a USB connected external DVD-R/W. The other is the built-in one that is only a CDRW/DVD-ROM. I don't have a floppy drive.

If I have to make a GRUB boot floppy, will the following commands (taken from "Linux in a nutshell") ...

$ dd if=stage1 of=/dev/"x" bs=512 seek=1
$ dd if=stage2 of=/dev/"x" bs=512 count=1

work on a USB memory stick? and would it be bootable? if so what is "x" in the above commands?

And yes I can reinstall XP first and then Fedora 10, but re-installing the packages for Fed10 is just so unwholesome. I haven't figured out how to copy my packages to DVD and then have Linux look for them on the DVD,yet.

Please, help.

One foolproof method that I follow in such cases is using the mkbootdisk utility,

$yum install mkbootdisk

As the name says, it makes a boot disk based on the current snapshot of the kernel state.

Open up terminal and do., [sudo OR su (whichever applicable)]
Here : sample.iso - name of the iso file to create, can also be a path.
--iso - is used to tell the command to create an iso image on the disk
--verbose - is used to print put the status
`uname -r` - is used to specific the current kernel, if you have more than one kernel, you can even give the name of the particular one. [.NOTE: Those are backticks, not single quote, i.e., the ~ key ..]

Once done, burn the iso to a cd and keep it somewhere safe. Say your GRUB went kaput, boot with this cd, it will search for Linux partitions and mount it. Then just issue
For more on mkbootdisk, see its documentation or man page.

Some pretty detailed instructions on this site:

http://apcmag.com/how_to_dual_boot_l...lled_first.htm

Whenever you install a windows OS, it will overwrite the master boot record of any other OS previously installed so be prepared for that. Believe instructions are on this site.

You need to know which drives are which so in Fedora, log on as root in aa terminal/konsole by typing "su" or "su -" (without quotes) and entering command "fdisk -l" to get partition info. That's a lower-case Letter L, not a number one.

The dd command you refer to, the "x" refers to the partition which would be the output of the fdisk -l command, sda1 (first drive, first partition) sda2 (first drive, second partition). You should not need a Grub boot floppy as Grub is easy to install. After xp is installed you log on to Fedora with your Fedora install disk as root, get to a grub prompt by typing "grub" in a terminal (grub>) and enter the commands, assuming your system (root) files are on sda2:

root (hd0,1)
setup (hd0)
quit

If you're not clear, post again.

First, an aside: There are several fairly good Linux packages with much of the functionality of Mathematica that might let you avoid the XP problems.

The problem with installing XP after Linux is just that XP will replace GRUB with NTLDR as your boot loader. But, if you can still boot from your install media, you can just select the "repair an existing system" (or, for F10, press <Esc> at the first screen and enter linux rescue) to boot the rescue mode. Then a chroot, as described after the boot finishes, will get you into your system as "root," at which point you can do a grub-install /dev/sda to blow away the NTLDR and replace it with GRUB.

You'll still need to add a stanza to /boot/grub/grub.conf to let you boot XP, but that's fairly trivial.

Note that you can add a stanza to C:\boot.ini on the XP side (after using dd to copy the GRUB boot sector to a file on the XP C: drive) to use that as the boot image. But GRUB is, in my opinion, a much better boot loader than NTLDR, so why bother.

here is a how to about reinstalling windows WITH OUT destroying fedora
"HOWTO Reinstall XP Without Destroying Fedora When the XP CD Balks"
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=167302

Doesn't windows need to be on the first partition?
Or have I got that wrong.

No, that was Win98. NT, XP, Vista can be on any partition on any drive. (They all use the NTLDR which gives you a little more flexibility than the older loader.)

and for xp the system can be fooled to have xp "think" it is on the first part of the first drive .When if fact it is not.

I'm interested in the Mathematica on Wine problem, so I
looked around a bit.

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManage...cation&iId=425
says it works well as long as you disable the beep.

What version of Wine and Mathematica did you try, and what were the symptoms?

I downloaded Mathematica Player, and it crashes on startup, so I filed
a bug for that,
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16635