Dual Boot With Windows XP
 

Maybe you guys can help me out here. I want to have a dual boot machine and I don't want to install anything on my laptop, which I use most of the time, until I am confident about what it is I am doing. I have an "extra" desktop computer that I am using for my Linux installation.

I started with a completely clean 30 Gig hard drive, Installed and updated Windows XP Pro and then partitioned the hard drive so I could install Linux on the free space. Everything seemed to go as planned except I never did see an option to for a bootloader. I just went through the process of installing and hoped for the best. Once this was done I rebooted the machine and it booted into Windows XP but there was no chance to choose Linux instead. I'm not even sure how to access Linux from here.

I installed Fedora Core 5 and really don't want to remove and reinstall if I don't absolutely have to. Any suggestions?

well it looks like you are in for a few surprises, i mean you have to be prepared to at least reinstall your system a few times before you pick the distro of choice and get everything right. i generally advice to use a more newbie (like myself) friendly distro like mepis or kubuntu, i have even heard of some newbies being happy with xandros oce. i have tried it myself in the past but i don't like its package handling system. with the other two distro's i have never had any problems with the bootloader, particularly (k)ubuntu does a good job at recognising other linux distro's aswell as incorporate them correctly into the bootloader menu, mepis recognises itself and windows flawless, but ignores other distro's, however, this can be easily fixed when you edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file. i have tried fedora, pclinux, mandrake, red hat, cent os but i wasn't too impressed, i think i am more a debian person. but no matter what distro you choose, you will have to be prepared to fiddle around to get it the way you want, but it is doable.

rgds
ron

With Fedora 6 I reinstall the bootloader by booting the install DVD, choosing F5 for rescue mode, type the rescue mode command shown onscreen to boot into rescue mode, allow the search for Fedora installations (you may need to specify the partition), and change the root environment from the rescue system to your installed system by typing something like chroot /mnt/sysimage, then run grub-install.
All of these instructions are displayed on the screen if you look for them. I used Fedora 4 and it had a similar procedure.
To be safe you may wish to post your /boot/grub/menu.lst here for feedback before running grub-install.