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Old 08-29-2005, 05:02 PM   #1
mathewjn
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Cannot Find Hard Drive


I am trying desparately to setup a new DELL laptop (One hard drive with 80G - partitioned 45GB - WIN and 30 GB Linux) for dual boot.

When I installed the Linux software, it gave me a list of IDE drivers to choose from - and I was able to partition and install software completely.

However, when I tried to get back in rescue mode to change the grub.conf file (to add the Windows title), it simply would not go to the screen that initially allowed me to choose the driver to find the hard drive.

As a result, I can go into rescue mode - but cannot find the hard drive - and then consequently, cannot copy the input file to a FAT32 format for copying onto the Windows partition to set up for dual boot.

What is happening here - why is rescue mode so flaky in the sense that sometimes it finds the Hard drive - but whenever I have a USB device plugged in, it never finds the HD. BTW - the USB device is a floopy that I intend using to get the .img file off and copy onto the windows directory.

Help....I have spent almost a whole weekend trying to get this achieved - never thought I would encounter such a roadblock for something that looked so simple on the face of it.

Thanks

 
Old 08-29-2005, 09:57 PM   #2
teckk
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Does your machine boot to linux now?
If so edit menu.lst as root and add your windows partition. Something like

title Windows XP Amateur
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

Substitute your own parameters. hd0,0 points to harddrive #0 and partition #0 which is /dev/hda1

menu.lst is at /etc/menu.lst or /boot/menu.lst somewhere like that. Sorry, I'm on my BSD box right now. Look for it.

Grub will boot to either partition for you. Windows has to be on a primary partition. Install windows 1st then Linux. Usually RedHats installer Anaconda finds the windows partition and makes the appropriate entry into grub. You should be able to boot into recovery mode with your install CD to reinstall grub if you need to. I know you said that the rescue CD wont find the hard drive. You may have to mount it. I've never used the rescue part of the Fedora CD. I boot a live CD like Knoppix to solve things.

Lots of info here.
http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz
 
Old 08-30-2005, 04:14 PM   #3
mathewjn
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Found an alternative method.

I was able to use a driver from http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm to view my linux partitions via Windows XP. With this, I was able to create the linux.bin file and then export it to my roto directory under my XP Install, change the boot.ini file on Windows and succesfully enable dual boot.
 
  


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