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Dual-Boot screen disappears after XP installation
Hi all.
I've encountered a problem after re-installing WinXP on my dual-boot machine. When I first installed Linux (currently FC6), XP was already installed. GRUB created a dual-boot screen and all was well. WinXP (as it does more often than not) crashed due to a trojen or whatever and I had to reinstall. After the installation, the dual-boot screen has vanished and I can't boot into Linux anymore. How can I reconfigure GRUB to let me dual boot? (damn windows trying to take over my machine) Thanks! -soundwave- |
Take a look at this article.
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Thanks for the super-fast reply! :)
I'll read the article and give it a go. |
Ok, still not there..
I've booted the FC6 DVD and gone into Rescue Mode. I've typed Code:
# chroot /mnt/sysimage/(when I tried it with "dev/hda" like the article suggested, I got a message that the device doesn't contain any boot info. I suppose it's because I'm using a serial-ATA drive) I've exited the shell and the system rebooted. GRUB loaded fine, but when I try to boot into FC6, I get this message: Code:
Booting 'Fedora Core (2.6.18-1.2849.fc6)'Could it be that the linux partition had been damaged somehow? I can think of one thing... 2 days ago, I downloaded "g-parted", a partitioning software for Gnome. I wanted to resize my "boot" partition, and give some of its GBs to the root partition. When I launched g-parted, it scanned for devices, and when I selected "sda", it gave me a list of that drive's partitons. It showed 3 partitions: the XP partition (100gb), the boot parition (80gb) and the root partition (40gb). Sizes aren't accurate, can't remember the actual values... but the ratio is about right. Anyway, all 3 partitions were locked, so I couldn't resize them or do anything to them... the root parition's detected filesystem was "unknown" by the software. The boot partition was ext3. (I may be wrong about which partition was unknown... maybe it was the boot). XP's partition was ntfs. I then exited the software without applying any changes. But I could boot into FC6 without problems... Any ideas? or would I have to reinstall? :( Thanks! -soundwave- |
It seems like there is something wrong with your root partition and its not being identified as a partition supported by Linux. Run gparted again and close the gparted app itself when it loads. After that start a terminal session and enter "fdisk -l /dev/sda".
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ahhhmm... how can I run gparted if I can't boot into FC6?
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Quote:
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Boot from your DVD using linux rescue, do the chroot, and you should be in your FC6 system as "root." (Just as you did in post 4.) Then a "startx" should put you into GNOME. But before you do that, try a fdisk -l /dev/sda to see where your /boot partition is located. (It should be the only type 83 partition listed if you used the default Fedora install options.)
Your problem may be that the XP install reordered the partitions. The root (0,1) is telling GRUB that your FC6 is on partition 2 of your first disk and XP may have "snuck" another partition into there. Try using GRUB's e option, and see what happens if you change the (0,1) to (0,2). If the b fails to boot you, you'll just come back to the GRUB screen, so no harm done. If you do boot, you'll have to edit /boot/grub/grub.conf to have the correct root value, since GRUB does not save the edited boot command lines. You should also correct the map file that GRUB uses if partition numbering is the problem. (See info grub for how to do all this.) <edit> I'm not sure, but I think than a "7f" partition type is a XP "volume group" partition. </edit> |
Resolved :D
Thanks for all the help, guys. I used Grub's "e" option to try different partitions... it booted into FC6 from (hd0,2). I edited grub.conf to boot FC6 from "sda2" and all is well now. WinXP tries to confuse our machines so it could dominate :) Thanks again! -soundwave- |
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