Hi guys

Heres the thing. I have 2 hard drives. Primary hard drive has XP professional installed. Secondary hard drive has FC1 installed. Both Operating systems where installed independantly meaning their MBR has not been overridden by either operating systems. Right now i can only boot into XP because its primary. On FC1 i have grub installed and I want to use grub as my bootloader. How can i configure it without having to do any reinstallations?

Thanks in advance

I don't use GRUB myself, but I believe the command is:Baldrick

Yes /sbin/grub-install /dev/hda
(BUT REMEMBER, you have to get to linux first, so use a boot disk to get there, you can use FC1 CD1 and at prompt (where you just pressed enter at install, type: linux rescue. Once in linux rescue command line, use /sbin/grub-install /dev/hda. If this doesn't work, you probably missed the message which said you have to chroot /mnt/sysimage first)

So the proper way is:
FC1 CD1
linux rescue
chroot /mnt/sysimage
/sbin/grub-install /dev/hda
reboot


This will install grub into your MBR of the primary harddisk (hda being hard disk a (a-primary, b-secondary....)).

So now you have GRUB in your primary harddisks MBR. Neat, but not so fast. You loose access to your XP.

To regain access to your XP system, you have to edit the /boot/grub/grub.conf file, with using emacs or some other editor in linux. The contents of the grub.conf file are as shown below:

title Fedora....
root(hd1,0)
kernel ....
initrd .......

What you should add is this:

title Win XP
rootnoverify(hd0,0)
chainloader +1

What you have done is added a line to the grub menu, which is shown to you at boot. I presumed that win XP is installed on c: on the primary harddisk (hd0,0) where hd0 is your primary harddisk and 0 is the primary partition, c:.

Now when you reboot. You should get the grub menu, like before and you will see the lines Fedora and Win XP. Just select the one you want and you will be in the OS you selected. It's as easy as that

thanks alot guys i will try it and see what happens

OK, Does Windows (any version) always have to be chainloaded from the first partition of the primary HDD?
I have Windows XP on partitions 4 & 5 with the OS that was occupying the primary partition gone awol. I have Fedora Core1 on a secondary HDD, with Redhat 8 on the primary HDD on more of the extended partition. I use Grub as the boot manager.

On startup I can boot any Linux install I have from grub, but Windows will not boot . OK I know that it is not at (HD0,0) - from rootnoverify(hd0, 0) - but if i change this to what it should be - rootnoverify(hd0,4) it will not work.

Since the OS that was in the primary partition is gone (it was windows 98) does this mean that if you want to boot any windows from grub it MUST have an installation in the first partition of the primary?