Installation Problem
 

I just installed WinXP Home Edition and Fedora Core 4 in my PC. On booting if I choose 'Other' (Windows) it will display

Booting 'Other'
roonoverify (hd0,4)
chainloader + 1

wich I think its normall.
But it did not load the Windows OS.

I tried Fedora and it works

I tried this command

# df -h

it doen's display the other partitions (ntfs, vfat)

I know that

/dev/hda5 is vfat
and
/dev/hda6 is ntfs

Please help me. How can I boot my windows OS. Thank you very much

You need to identify the "C" directory of your XP.

do a fdisk -l in Fedora and list its content here.

The file that control Grub in booting is /boot/grub/menu.lst which you can also list here. Its last 3 lines should correspond to what you have declared so far.

Logical partition always starts with the 5th and Grub counts from 0. Thus (hd0,4) is hda5.

There isn't one chance in hell XP can be booted from a logical partition. If you have installed XP correctly it has to be in (hd0,0), (hd0,1) or (hd0,2) respresenting primary partitions of hda1, hda2 and hda3.

XP can only be installed and booted from a primary partition.

What boot loader did you install? You need either grub or lilo, both should be available from your linux install. You are probably not seeing the vfat and ntfs partitions because they are not mounted. You need to make a mount point in your linux file system, and issue a mount command. To make it perminent, you can edit your /etc/fstab file and add the lines for each partition there.

Im using grub. and its in the cylinder 2

I have already mounted and tested the windows XP OS.
But I cant boot.

Windows XP is /dev/hda6

Your /dev/hda6 tells me that you have installed XP in a logical partition.

XP is not known to be bootable in a logical partition! None of the M$ systems does!

I would love to be proved wrong because I've got DOS, Win3x, Win9x, Win2k and XP in the same box with a number of Linux.

so what should I do? reinstall both OS? does the sequence of partitions affects the booting also?

You have to install XP in any of hda1, hda2, hda3 or hda4.

As you are using logical partitions so one of the above must have become an extended partition which has no space inside except for pointing out the starting and finishing end of the logical partitions.

Normally you will save a lot of problems by giving the hda1 to XP but that isn't mandatory, just preferrable.

The installation of XP will overwrite FC4 bootloader in the MBR thereby making it unbootable. You can restore the boot loader, which should be Grub, later on but a better way is to save Grub in a floppy now(so that you can always boot FC4 with it). The bootable floppy can be created by logging in FC4 as root, pop a floppy in the drive and type

grub-install /dev/fd0

My guess is you may have spread your FC4 into several partitions and may not be able to give any of the hda1, hda2, hda3 or hda4 to XP for installation. Thus you may have to re-install both systems.

If you reinstall both systems can I suggest to you to partition 20Gb as hda1 for XP, about 1Gb for Swap and put it in a logical partition which will be hda5 and create another logical partition hda6 with about 10Gb for FC4. Tell FC4 installer to use hda6 as mounting point for the root / and don't bother creating other partitions. This will make the installer putting the entire FC4 into hda6 which is the preferred method for maintaining the Linux. You only split up FC4 into several partitions if you have no intention of using anther Linux. You will find one partition per Linux is a lot easier to control the booting. Leave the rest of the hard disk space for future use.

If you install XP first and FC4 second Grub should dual boot both system automatically. That is the route for the least work.

ok il try it then

thanx