THE NIGHTMARE for everyone is the death of grub in a Fedora/windows multiple boot if grub was installed in mbr AND YOU HAVE TO RECOVER MBR FOR WINDOWS BOOTING PROBLEMS..in this case,neither following Aus9 grub how-tos

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=237511

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...postid=1413211

and googling,i could never re-install efficiently grub and i had to reinstall fedora from a partimage image file or reinstall it from scratch...



anyway,here in Fedora 9 i've found a working trick by myself:and it works perfectly;the secret is NOT INSTALLING GRUB IN MBR BUT INSTALLING IT ON ROOT PARTITION

Ive done it using different HARD DISKS FOR WINDOWS XP PRO WITH SP2 AND FEDORA 9 AMD 64 but it should work even using a single hard disk but i could not test it on a single one because i have 4 sata hard disk on the motherboard...anyway,KEEP IN MIND THAT IT SURELY WORKS FOR ME BUT I DON'T GUARANTEE IT WORKS FOR YOU TOO AND ANYWAY YOU DO EVERYTHING AT YOUR RISK AND I'M NOT RESPONSABLE FOR ANYTHING !





SO,here it goes:

1)during Fedora's installation,when you get the bootloader screen,select advanced and select to install BOOTLOADER IN Root Partition and NOT IN MBR !

2)select windows as default bootloader

3)reboot

4)win will start by itself as usual and you will not see any Grub menu screen selection

5)reboot and press F8 OR F10 OR F12 or any other key your bios uses to let you come to a boot device selection screen-in my case,i use F8-

6)Select the OTHER hard disk you used for fedora

7)now Grub will give you an error and fail to start

8)reboot using the fedora 9 installation cd and select to update your installation

9)Select to update the bootloader

10)at the bootloader screen,now select advanced again and select THIS TIME to install GRUb IN MBR

11)IN THE REALITY,IT will NOT install it in mbr BUT only update the menu.lst and keep grub in the / of fedora

12)reboot

13) windows will boot again by itself as no GRUB IS INSTALLED in MBR

14)AGAIN,USE THE KEY YOUR BIOS USE TO LET YOU CHOOSE THE HARD DISK YOU INSTALLED FEDORA IN AND CHOOSE IT

15)Now grub will appear and work for fedora:it will let you choose fedora and fedora will boot without any problems while,if you choose to boot win by here,grub will give you an error and windows will fail to start

16)WHENEVER YOU WANT TO BOOT WINDOWS,YOU WILL NOT HAVE TO DO ANYTHING ELSE THAn SIMPLY TURN ON THE PC AND LET THE MICROSOFT OS BOOT BY ITSELF

17)by this way,you can keep different and indipendent boots for Win and Fedora so that.if you have to fix and recover MBR for Win boot problems,after the recovery Fedora's grub will still be working perfectly,Fedora will boot and you will not have to become mad in trying to re-install Grub and make it work



THAT'S ALL,FOLKS !

GOOD DAY WITH FEDORA !

I got lost, does windows boot auto without a boot menu and if so how do you select Fedora without going into bios and changing boot order?

Alternatively, install GRUB in the MBR of the second disk as usual. Copy the MBR via 'dd', put that copy on the XP disk, and set up the ntldr 'boot.ini' file to give you the option of booting that file copy of the MBR. That way, ntldr happily boots Grub. Unless of course Microsoft 'fixed' that problem.

Hi !

1)By this way,win boots by itself without showing any grub menu

2)by this way,the only way to select fedora is entering the bios option-in my case,i press F8,select HARD DISK 3 (WIN XP IS ON HARD DISK 1) and press enter :all this takes me only 4-5 seconds more than usually ! and then now i get to the usual grub screen boot menu

3)the trick stays in 1) and 2) : win and linux boots work separately and don't come to any conflict one to each other.


good day !

I did not know this way too...but mine anyway works perfectly

Cheers !

Just to be more clear..

I've tried all this on a AMD 3500 64 bit with 2 Gb ram,Motherboard Asus a8n Sli Deluxe,Ge force 6600 gt,Soundblaster live 24 bit,4 sata hard disks so configured:

hard disk 1: win xp sps ntfs

hard disk 2: ntfs backups for win xp

hard disk 3: fedora 9 amd 64

hard disk 4: fat 32 backups for fedora

after installing fedora 9 and before writing this how to,even if win xp perfectly booted without any problems in a win /fedora 8 dual boot,i recovered 2 times the mbr by the fixmbr and fixboot options from a win xp cd Recovery console...and everything worked so well that i decided <to write the how-to.


ciao !

Booting indirectly will give you the result of chainloading without worrying about your boot record as long as you never touch the mbr. Then you can build a menu list and not have to enter bios everytime. The good thing is you found a way that can work for you.

Thank you,Larry


Not worring about boot record is my aim and my goal !

...but i'm not going to edit manually menu.lst and add a voice for win xp..everything works perfectly by this way that i don't want to complicate my life..


good day !

The way I used to do it, was pull the power cord to the windows HD and then let fedora install to mbr. you can then use bios to boot fedora, and set grub up to boot windows. But as far as windows is concerned, it has it's normal mbr.