I suggest to boot a distro in rescue mode, Knoppix or Fedora Core 2 rescue ISO. Run parted or fdisk and zap all partitions before reinstalling Windows.

I don't know what brand your drive is... but they may have helpful info.

Western Digital, for example, has many articles in their support section that may of interest: Boot Problems.

Other manufacturers have similar support.

I've had this with FC2 and SuSE 9.1

Have you checked that the drive is set to LBA and not CHS in the bios?

Not sure who's made your drive but Seagate and Maxtor have free utilities to put on floppy which set the drive up ok. Worked for me anyway.

I had the same problem and found that fc2 had somehow changed my bios setting from LBA. Setting it back fixed everything...

Same thing happened to me. It's a known issue for the last few months. If you can check from auto to lba in your bios for your hard drives, do it and you'll be fine.

Mark

I have read some of the threads in this post. I see that someone is irate and has had a similiar problem with fedora , that I (and many others) have had. Firstly fair enough about the attitude but can you really blame him? as redhat has went from newbie friendly to [possible destruction of hard drive if one were to panic and thrash with the many partitioning tools]

Anyway , today I installed fedora 2 and all seemed to go well , I set it up to dual boot with windows xp pro. Basically windows xp was on my first drive(prim ary master) and linux fedora was on my 2nd drive(primary slave).

The above setup was troublesome, initially the grub bootloader hanged with the words GRUB and I couldnt boot windows or linux, on top of that I couldnt boot from a floppy startup disk!! as well as which my MBR and partitions were wrecked by the linux install, at this point I just wanted to get back to windows (great work linux devs) anyway I found and read this tutorial which got me back a hard drive that could be read by any normal O/S http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/

After doing this however I could get into linux but not windows, so I could now boot from a CD so I decided to reinstall windows on the other partition... I went round and round in circles with half success and ended up with windows but no linux, what a joke.... I stopped linux a while back and was into solaris for a while, at this time though I always said that linux redhat was the closest condedor to windows and had all the various API stuff but as it is just now..... well windows 95 is more stable get the bugs fixed.... ow right enough this is the free version pay and I suppose the issues wont be there? Since fedora it seems the open source side of redhat is being neglected

David

I installed FC2 before finding out about the drive geometry problem, soon found it after install though!

After rebuilding my system from scratch ie: booting XP disk, deleting every partition, booting with the Seatools app from Seagate and setting up my drive the way it was with 3 partitions, I went back to FC1.

Anyway, armed with the info on this forum and various other sources I've installed FC2 about 10 minutes ago.

I first checked my drive was set to LBA, checked the CHS values (just in case) and then booted the install disc selecting upgrade instead of new install (someone else on here did the same and recommended it). I also selected to update grub instead of writing it again.

Everything seems ok, 'doze works anyway 'coz I'm on here and I've reinstalled the nvidia drivers because x couldn't start and the log mentioned it so I'm off now to see whats what.

Fingers crossed!

also check out the Ultimate Boot CD lot of usefull floppy images that all boot off the cd.

After you did fdisk mbr, did you set up your primary partition AND make it startable with fdisk? I've gone back and forth with both os's and never ran into what's happening to you. BTW what size and type of hd are you using?

unixmad

sorry to hear about your troubles.

Most people, as soon they get in a fix while attempting to dual boot, reinstall one OS. This is not the ideal solution. 'coz if you reinstall windows, it would write to your mbr and so you will not be able to boot into linux. This is what happened with you.

The thing to do is ask for help, do a google search, search at LQ, 'coz many ppl face this problem. What basically needs to be done is to edit the grub.conf file. It actually is very easy and has been discussed to shreds over time at LQ.

Let me assure you, fedora is not bad. I first tried FC1 and then moved over to core 2 and I've loved it all along. No hassles for me.

Hope you have luck with your setup.

Here's another hint, in case you're still having problems:

When I tried Lindows (which used LILO instead of GRUB) I had to use not only Fix MBR but also a fixboot to get everything working correctly (Windows XP SP1).

From your earlier comments, I think that you *might* have tried that, but both times it said Fix , never fix boot, so I am not sure.

FC2 did not alter my geometry the first couple of times - I never had problems installing it and getting it to work, but I could not get it to boot unless I installed GRUB on the MBR.

However I have other issues to be dealt with in another thread.

Hi,
Just to let you no I got fedora 2 & windows working, what I did was I installed linux fedora 2 on my primary drive hda, the next thing my 2nd drive /dev/hdb was screwed up so I went into windows xp recovery console and formatted drive /dev/hdb.....(this wouldnt work with standard windows install). I then installed windows on /dev/hdb & it worked. Now I didnt put windows on the grub bootloader what I did is switch the order of drives in the bios, this is dependant on what O/S I want to start, I no this is unconventional but it works. The only thing is that not everyone will be able to do this with 2 drives as not all bioses allow you to switch the order of drives.

Also I may have been angry before but I have good reason as I backed my HND stuff up on an independant partition thinking it would be safe & grub screwed it and I lost my backups...... so basically if there are any screwups at the scottish qualification authority this year Im going to have to do HND units again that I have already passed as I no longer have the work to re-submit. Great stuff

Regards
David

I use WD CLEAR from western digital to wipe my hard drives. It will write 0's to the entire drive, including the MBR..

ftp://ftp.wdc.com/drivers/hdutil/wd_clear.exe (self extracting file)

Make a bootable floppy, then copy the extracted EXE to the floppy and run it.
Remember, it wipes EVERYTHING; handy or harmful.

BTW, Fedora didn't f@ck up your PC, Windoze is incapable of recognizing a drive with an "unknown" sig on the MBR.

David

I am sorry about your loss. But I am glad you are sticking with linux. That is great. Wish you good luck