Problems booting Fedora on a Dell Optiplex 960

Gonoph · 02-03-2009, 05:36 AM

Hi all, and thanks for reading.

I have just received delivery of a Dell Optiplex 960 through my work. My institute's IT do not support Linux directly, and since some of the applications that I will be using in the near future require 64 bit Linux, I intend to migrate to Linux as my main OS for work. (I also need to still keep a windows installation.)

I have got two hard drives. On the first hard drive (sda), I have a 40GB Windows XP partition with a further empty 200GB partition.

The second hard drive (sdb) is empty and is where I intended to boot Fedora 10 (64 bit) from.

I booted from the Fedora 10 DVD and installed to hard drive sdb, selecting it as the default boot option and installing the boot loader to, firstly, the MBR of sdb. When rebooting after successfully installing the OS, it booted directly into XP.

I tried again - this time I reinstalled the OS with the boot loader on the first sector of the boot partition of sdb, rebooted after successful installation and again it booted back into XP.

Am I missing something obvious or does Dell have some specific BIOS checks that are tinkering with the MBR, restoring XP as the default each time I boot?

I am relatively new to Linux and would appreciate any input you may have.

Thanks a lot...

stress_junkie · 02-03-2009, 07:57 AM

You are doing a good thing by putting GRUB onto the second hard drive. That will keep the Windows MBR intact on the first hard drive. Now you need to configure XP to dual boot. Edit C:\boot.ini to include the second hard drive. Then Windows will show you a menu with both operating systems when you start the machine. You can then choose whether to boot Windows or Fedora.

Or

You can make a copy of the Windows MBR then install GRUB onto the first hard drive. This is the approach that most people would take.

Or

You can set up the BIOS to boot from the second hard drive rather than the first. Then if you wanted to boot Windows you could either select that from the GRUB menu or you could start the machine, press F12 to show the machine's boot menu, and boot from the first hard drive.