I have a Dell Inspiron 6000, with a 60Gb hard drive, 1Gb of RAM and a DVD-RAM drive.

I installed "Fedora Core 4" and "Windows XP (SP2)" on the machine last year and all worked well.

The system had four partitions;
2 for Fodera Core 4
1 for Windows XP
1 small partition for Dell's hardware utilities
and the default was to boot into Windows.

In the weekend I attempted to install "Fedora Core 5" from DVD and I used all the default values suggested. The install seemed to go well, but ...

when I reboot the PC displays the following text and hangs.
"GRUB Loading stage2.."

I have tried reinstalling "Fedora Core" but the system keeps saying that the software is up to date.
I can also boot off the DVD and go into the "rescue" mode but not sure what to look for. I have a reasonable knowledge of Unix through work but fairly new to Linux on PC's.

m nt completly sure abt the problem but looks your bootloader didnt load properly, y not spend another 20-30 mins for a fresh installationa dn see if it works fine ... if it doesnt then please let us know... we ll try to see what went wrong...

I have tried to reinstall the software several times. Each time it checks the configuration and says that the PC is up to date.

During the install process I have gone into the options where it allows the user to select partition information and the settings same reasonable.
I have also tried changing the settings (eg default partition) but this does not seem to have any affect - get messages to say the PC is up to date.

Is there any (easy) way to just reinstall "grub" or force "grub" changes to take affect?

you can try reinstalling grub _
keep the cd1 of your linux distribution and at boot promt type
boot: linux rescue <- press enter

once u enter the user promt type -
#/sbin/grub-install /dev/hda <- chk hda it should be your boot partition

now reboot it should work.
the above description is mainly for fedora users ... just try if it works

Hi, I reinstalled grub as you suggested and have regained access to Fedora Core 5 and Windows XP.

Not, sure what happened when I upgraded Fedora.

Thanks for the help.

Thanks for this thread! I've tried to figure this problem out for a week after a half a dozen installs that failed to produce a booting copy of core 5.

One more step I had to go through before I was able too boot my system was to issue the command "/sbin/grub-install --recheck" and then follow it wit the command mentioned above. When I issued the command mentioned above without doing the "recheck" I recieved an error message.

Thanks again for the help guys!