Hello all,

After messing around with Fedora Core 6 for a while, I removed it from my system by deleting and reformatting the partitions it was installed on. My computer previously was set up to dual boot windows XP and Fedora.

I plan on installing Ubuntu 8.10 when it comes out soon, but in the meantime I'm just using XP.

When I boot up, GRUB comes up in a command-line mode. From here I can boot into XP. So I suppose I have a couple of questions:

1: Is there a way I can set up GRUB from its command line to automatically boot into XP without me needing to type in the commands? The only way I knew how to do this was to modify grub.conf which has now been wiped off.

2: Have I done anything that will hinder me installing Ubuntu (I know formatting my partitions was a fairly brute-force way to get Fedora off of there)? Will I need to remove GRUB as it exists now to allow for a proper install of Ubuntu that will let me dual boot XP/Ubuntu?

Thanks for any help.

Kevin

If you can boot into linux in some form (live CD, FC6 in rescue mode), find grub's menu.lst and modify it so that there is a line

default=x

where x is the OS entry corresponding to XP. Note that this numbering stars as zero, not one.

Set

timeout=y

where y is the number of seconds to wait until it boots the default. You could set this at zero, but one may be a better option. So, you may end up with

default=0
timeout=1

Hope that helps.


If you have a problem, post menu.lst.

Oops - just saw the bit about grub.conf being wiped.

The other thing to do is reinstall the Windows loader with a utility called fixmbr on the install/rescue disk.

Or you could reinstall grub on the old FC6 partition

I would just reinstall the Windows MBR (Master Boot Record) that you had before using Grub. Like Billymayday said, if you have your Windows Install CD, go to the "recovery console" and run:
Or since you can boot into Windows, just download "MBRFix 1" and use that to reinstall a Windows MBR. Let us know how it goes.

Thanks for the suggestion! MbrFix did it, and only took a couple of seconds.