Greetings to all:

It has been a while since I used Linux for the last time and I'm having problems now trying to getting it to work.

On my system I got 1 SATA drive (/dev/sda) plus 2 IDE drive(/dev/hda and hdb respectably). I have WinXP 64 installed on /dev/sda and I installed FC6 on /dev/hdb.

While performing the installation, I configured grub to install on the /dev/sda MBR cuz that's the drive I boot my computer from. Everything goes great, not a hassle, the install procedure finish and I'm ask to reboot the system, and here's where the problem begin.

The computer reboot and instead of showing me the grub menu as I expected, it jumped straight to boot WinXP. I went on to reinstall FC6 thinking that I might have made a mistake when selecting the drive to install Grub on, and I carefully choose /dev/sda, then installation routine went on, and when the system rebooted, the same behaviour, it booted right on WinXP.

The question: Is there a special way to install Linux when using SATA drives, do I need to put my drives in a special order, should I install FC on the SATA drive so Grub installs there?

Any help on this issue will be greatly appreciated.

Have a good one everyone.

Try this method.

1) Pop-up the FC cd/dvd
2) Type 'linux rescue' at the prompt
3) Then 'chroot /mnt/sysimage'
4) Finally 'grub-install /dev/sda'
5) Reboot.

Are you sure the windows bootloader is actually on your sda? It might be it is actually on hda...
Check the boot order in your bios. The SATA drive might appear as SCSI there.
You can also install grub to hdb and use the dd command to copy out a boot file and install that in the Windows bootloader (so you get Linux as a choice in the windows menu).

Well, the order in my hard driver configuration in the BIOS is as follow:

1-sata drive (/dev/sda)
2-IDE (/dev/hda)
3-IDE (/dev/hdb)

From the info above, I could assume that the NTLOADER is installed on the MBR of the SATA drive. On my BIOS, in order to boot from hdb I have to change the drives order, and I don't know if Linux will get confused and "think" that hdb is now hda because of the new drive order.

am I being clear enough?

I just want to use Linux once again, and it's getting frustrating, it was a lot easier in the good old days.

Thanks a lot for the help.

Very strange. You should have seen Grub then..
It could still be that the bootloader is in hda while the rest of Windows is in sda (I think).

What should work though if you follow the "Setting Up the Bootloader for RAID" in FakeRaidHowto, running the grub commands and setup to your hdb drive. I presume you haven't actually got RAID set up with one of those strange /dev/mapper/ devices though (?). The Grub commands should broadly be the same though if you manage to work out the correct names for your drives accoridng to Grub.

You then run this: dd if=/dev/hdb of=/mnt/floppy/linux.bin bs=512 count=1
You need a floppy to write to. The file linux.bin can then be copied onto your C drive in Windows. You then have to add Linux to your windows boot by editing boot.ini.

You can also try to install grub to hda, and see what happens. Maybe best if you have a bootable Windows DVD, so you can run fixmbr from the DVD repair console if something goes wrong.