hi I am a newbie. tried to make a dual boot system with winxp. Installed winxp first, then FC5.
on reboot after installation FC5 grub did not start at all, it just booted winxp. I installed grub on the MBR. did that twice so it cost me a lot of time
installed winxp on HD1, (IDE) and FC5 on SATA.

Tried to change the boot sequence in the bios but then the error is 'error loading OS'
hope anyone can help me without have to install both OS again
tnks

I don't know anything about grub, but you did the right thing by installing WinXP first. It sounds like grub got installed on the partition superblock if grub didn't start. Or maybe it got installed on the MBR of the second drive, but that won't help if master is pointing to the drive with Win on it. This also sounds very likely.

Do some searches on this board for boot SATA. There has been discussion.

Also, if you want people to be able to help, try to cut and paste the output of fdisk -l and also your grub config and then we can see exactly what the situation is. As long as Win and FC5 got installed normally, I don't think you will have to reinstall to fix this. Someone who knows grub and the SATA issues can probably see the problem quickly.

Hi

Can you boot into Fedora with a boot disk? If you can, paste your Grub config file (found in /boot/grub/grubconfig). It sounds like grub somehow got installed on the SATA disk and is not being seen when you boot up.

Bob

ok guys tnx for reply
1) xp does not have the nice utility fdisk, so I cannot get paretition info
2) trying to do a brand new installation of both xp and FC5. so do you have any suggestions? fe install xp on SATA, or on 'normal' HD? I intend to use win xp only for medical progs that will not work under linux.
tnx

Always keep a live CD around. I like Slax and Kanotix. Using a live CD, you can go into your linux file system and find the lilo.conf (same for grub) and fix lilo or grub. You can also use fdisk, qtparted, cfdisk, all the good stuff.

I don't think people need to install Win and linuxes on separate drives unless they are out of space. Many people run Win and a variety of operating systems from one drive.

Yes, that is true. I currently have Slackware, FC4, FC5 and Winxp all one SATA drive. However, I will that at one time I did have an IDE drive I used in windows for storage. No Linux distro ever recognized it. I believe this a problem here. If Grub is installed on the SATA drive, it is not finding the IDE (that is what happened to me).

Bob

ok guys fixed it.
detached ide from motherboard, then installed winxp on sata, but left unpartitioned space for fedora, installed fedora and hatsaflatsa!!! changed firstboot in my bios and all went well
tnx for support!!

Glad you got it fixed and thanks for posting the resolution.

Another one rides the bus!

hi,
problem wasn't with IDE or SATA.
problem was that your bootloader was getting installed into the MBR of SATA.
And generally in most of the cases its advisable to install windows and linux on the same drive.
reason being, suppose you install windows successfully on 1st drive and linux on second drive. Boot loader is the MBR of first drive....in nutshell...everything is fine.
Now suppose you detatch the linux hard driver from your system. You won't be able to boot into windows too.
grub will generate the error.

Hence its better to install the o/s in the same drive and mount the new drives accordingly.

regards

[QUOTE=ruudra]hi,
problem wasn't with IDE or SATA.

Let me just mention that I have four distros disppersed among two SATA drives with grub on the first SATA. When I tried the same thing with one SATA and one IDE, wouldn't work. Grub would not boot to the IDE. As soon as I put the other SATA drive in, worked first boot.

Bob