Hi everyone!

I have a desktop with Fedora 7 installed on it and today I bought a new hard drive and installed Fedora 9 on it (since my F7 is working really well, I didn't want to get rid of it). However, I'm afraid I've made a mistake during the installation of F9, more precisely at the step where we select/edit the partitioning layout.

First under "Select the drive(s) to use for this installation", both sda and sdb were checked by default, so I unchecked sda to make sure that it would only install on sdb; and above I chose "Use free space on the drive and create default layout"

Then under "What drive would you like to boot this installation from?", I chose sda thinking that logically it would see the F7 installation and give me a choice between F7 and F9 at boot. When I clicked Next a message appeared asking me if I was sure that I wanted F9 to boot from a drive it wasn't installed on and I answered Yes.

Well I guessed wrong because now when I boot, F9 is my only choice. I'm no table to boot F7 anymore.

So please, does somebody know what I must do to fix my mistake and get F7 back?

Thank you for your time.

Probably nothing serious, but could be awkward to fix - especially if you are using LVM on both.
Might be easiest to use the first (install) CD to boot into the FC7 system, and save /boot/grub/menu.lst to a USB key. Then boot into the F9 system, and edit the entry for FC7 into the same named file.

Thanks for your reply.

Yup, awkward to fix, you're right. I didn't know how to boot F7 with the install dvd so I did some experiments instead. I was completely lost with the rescue option so I tried to upgrade the system to see what it would do and it did reinstall F7's bootloader and it was fine. However that made me lose F9's bootloader. I tried to do the same thing with F9 as I did with F7, but this time it didn't work.

Finally, after realizing that F9 was working just as well as F7 on my desktop and 10 times faster, I just erased everything, did a fresh F9 install on my first hard drive and on my second, I installed Mandriva 2008.1 and this one did a much better job at making it's bootloader.

So now I have two great working systems and both are accessible.