Hi, I'm having a problem with my grub boot loader. I have 3 partitions on my PC one has Win2000, one with Fedora Core 1 and I was trying to install WinXP Pro on the other one. When I was trying to install WinXP (with no success) the grub boot loader was removed and also part of WinXP copied to my swap partition and the swap partition was formatted as NTFS. Why is this happening?? Fedora works without the swap partition, but I would like to get the swap partiton back and still intall winxp.

Please help

Usually its best to Install Windows first and then Linux. The order that i would install it would be Windows 2000, then Windows XP, and then Linux. That way during installation GRUB automatically configures all three OS's.

Is there a way to install GRUB or LILO when something like this happens? I think it's in the MBR right?

Yes, I did have installed Win2000 & WinXP before, but when I tryed to install Fedora the WinXP partition became corrupted and did not wanted to boot, so that is why I decided to install Fedora first and then WinXP. But, I guess I will have to try again to see what happens.

Thanks guys...

You need 4 partitions. One for Win2k, one for XP, one for Linux root and one for Linux swap.

You can have the NT loader run Linux. That's the way I do it. When installing Linux you need to tell the stupid Linux installer to put Grub on the first sector of the boot partition, not in the MBR.

Then copy that first 512 bytes of the boot partition to a file using the Linus dd command. If you have no separate boot partition, it will be on the first sector of the root partition. If the boot (or root) partition is the third partition, the dd command will look like this:
dd if=/dev/hda3 of=grub.bin bs=512 count=1

Copy that file to the "C" partition, where ntldr and boot.ini reside. Make an entry in boot.ini that looks like this:
c:\grub.bin="boot my Linux"

assuming you put grub in a file called grub.bin.

Just an FYI, but if you want to exchange data among your OSs, I'd suggest you have a 5th partition that's VFAT, so you can mount it under all the OSs. You can't write to NTFS, so you'd have to have all your windows partitions under FAT32 otherwise....