XP Pro drive 1, Fedora Drive, need dual boot
 

one says to install to MBR, one says not to.
one says need to install grub32 into Windows C:, one says no
I have tried 4 ways from these differnet threads, the only way to run 1 or the other is to unplug the power from my main drive(win xp)then it will boot from Fedora. SHould I have both set the master or leave as master and slave? fedora is on hdb1, win hda1.
but I noticed that the grub.conf didn't mention Win Xp at all, but did mention Fedora C6 2933 and 2798, if I say boot from 2933, it says drive hd0,0 not found, and the unhide doesn't work in grub, but I did try from root terminal.
I am totally new to this but I do love the fedora, works well, really impressed. but my kids are not the same so I need the dual boot.
Any help would be apreciated

Post the output of cat /boot/grub/menu.lst and the output of /sbin/fdisk -l. Tell us which drive is Windows and which drive is Linux.

how do you
 

How do I get this info?, I have to unplug the XP drive to get the Fedora drive to Boot. I can get the info from the Second harddrive, but what I really need is to do it from Windows becuase then both are hooked up. Make sense?

I may be able to help on your dual boot. Do you have ID drives or sata drives. Do you a floopy drive or just a CD burner. I have two methods on how to dual boot Fedora Core 6 using Windows Boot Manager.

harley51
 

I have a Samsung 120gb IDE set as master, Win XP Pro, HDA1 NTFS
I have a WD 200gb IDE set as slave, Fedora C6 /dev/hdb1 linux /boot
/dev/hdb2 linux lvm
I didn't put grub on mbr, I put it on first /boot

SHould I put Fedora drive as master, that way both drives would be plugged in and powered, maybe the fdisk -l wouold give me all the drive numbers. if I leave XP drive as master, I have to unplug power to boot to Fedora and I don't get the hd number from that drive.
Or I am I going about this all wrong.

Harley51
 

I don't have a floppy, but do have a DVD burner which is the way I have been trying to this, I either burner boot.lnx from fedora, or Nero in windows, I have wasted 3 cd's already, but whatever.

If you don't mind I need a few hours to write the CD Burner verison. I wrote this for a floppy drive years ago. But they don't have floppys much any more. This worked great last weekend. The reason why I asked about the drives I've only tested it on IDE drives. I do not use grug on the master mbr I use windows boot loader Grub goes on the first sector of the second drive. More to follow. It should explain all.

Here it is and I just tested it key stroke for key stroke and it worked great.


Fedora Core 6 Install

This by all means may not work for everybody.

I run an Intel D865perl motherboard with 2.6 gig Intel processor with 1 gig of ram. Two IDE 250 gig
hard drives. The first hard drive is for Windows XP. Second hard drive is for Fedora and data
backups.

Drive 2 the first 40 gig is Fedora and the second 210 gig is for files backups and Norton ghost 2007
images. Which I never doing anything without a current image file it will save your butt.

Install Fedora Core 6 on the second hard drive and use the automatic partitioning tool but don't
put grub on your Master MBR put it on the first sector on your second drive. When you get to the
Boot Loader Configuration screen make sure you check the Configure advanced boot loader
options. The next screen will give the option where to put Grub Boot Loader. It should say like
hda or hdb. Hda is usually your XP Drive. Put it on hdb. From their finish loading.

Now duel booting using XP boot manager (My Preference. I don't like third party boot managers.)

Use your rescue CD to boot for Fedora or your DVD or #1 install CD.
At the boot prompt press F2 or type linux rescue.
Hit enter for English
Hit enter for us
Setup network select no
At the rescue screen select continue
At the next rescue screen hit enter
Now you have a prompt sh-3.00#
At the prompt type in chroot /mnt/sysimage
If hdb2 is Not your boot partition, change it as appropriate. Type: df then determine which hda#
(Note: Mine reads /dev/hdb2)
Run the command dd if=/dev/hdb2 of=boot.lnx bs=512 count=1
You should see
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
Type ls and you should see a file named boot.lnx
At the prompt type mkdir /download
At the prompt type cp boot.lnx /download (Note: do a cd /download and then ls to see if it copied it
there if it did move on to next step)
Type mkisofs -o data.iso -r /download (Note: type ls you should see a file called data.iso)
At the prompt type dmesg your going to have to find your cd Burner in here. ( Note:It's a lot of info)
( Mine reads hdc: memorex 16x-DDL-IN, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive)
(Mine reads hdd: Memorex DVD16+/-DL4RW1D2,ATAPI CD-/DVD-ROM drive)
From here insert a CD-R or A CD-RW into the CD burner
Type cdrecord -v dev=/dev/hdd data.iso
It should have copied the file to your CD burner (Note: If you have another Windows Computer you
Can check to see if the file is there. It should have the boot.lnx on it.)

Now reboot to Windows

Copy boot.lnx to your root directory
Right click on your boot.ini file select properties and uncheck read only click ok
Double click your boot.ini file and add one line at the end it should read
C:\boot.lnx="Fedora Core 6". Then save it. When you reboot your XP boot
manager will come up and you can chose Fedora it jumps to the Grub Boot manager on your
second drive.

My file looks like this

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(0)(1)\windows
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(0)(1)\windows="Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2"
/fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
c:\boot.lnx="Fedora Core 6 Project"

You call it anything you want

Harley51
 

I kind of did something before I read your reply. I had acually followedstep by step what you had told someone else earlier, I had printed it up and followed. But at the end I got the grub with blinking cursor, that is when I started asking around. I tried another guys solution also but it didn't work either. I thought that maybe I had the grub file messed up or my windows boot messed up or both so I said *%^& it plugged in both drives, booted to the FC6 cd, did the linux rescue and install it onto hda, it works fine. except it boots to the linux splash screen then asks which to boot to, click on windoze and it goes to the windows boot screen and you click Windoze again and you are into windows. Do i need the windows loader to come up to?
Anyway, I am not sure what I did but it worked and I can boot into both.
Question is were is the loader, since both loaders fire up?
Thanks alot for the help from everyone who replied, I love the linux stuff and reaaly wanted to get this working. Nice feeling not have to depend on XP.
Thanks
Omar1962

The Fedora boot loader is in the MBR of the drive that is set to boot in the bios, which is apparently where I told you it should be, in hda according to what you are now saying.
The boot process starts from the bios, the bios does a POST (power on self test) to check that all hardware is OK and configured correctly, then when the POST checks out, the bios passes the control to the program/boot loader in the MBR (master boot record), of the drive set to boot first in the bios, normally with one operating system, the boot loader looks at the partition table in the MBR to see which partition to pass control over to the PBR (partition boot record/loader) which is the first sector of the bootable partition, and the program/boot loader in the PBR loads the kernel.
When you have a dual-boot, the properly configured boot loader in the MBR will see two bootable partitions and present you with a menu, when you make your selection it passes control to the PBR of the partition/OS you selected.
In your case, it sounds to me like you set up two boot loaders as I suspected in the other thread, only you did not mention that you tried setting up a Windows boot loader, if you would not have left that information out, I could have made better recommendations. It appears you now have a Windows boot menu in the PBR of the Windows boot partition. And a grub boot menu in the MBR of the same drive. You can more than likely dismantle the Windows boot menu in the PBR as it's useless there anyway. harley51 appears to be an expert in this area.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=545573