I am in need of some expert assistance. I have searched this forum and googled for dual boot help, but each one has its own nuance that is different than mine, and as I am a newbie at linux I am having difficulty adapting the solutions.

Hardware:
2 80Gb SATA drives

Software:
Win XP on /sda1
Fedora Core 5 on /sdb

I would like to use the windows boot loader, so have I have copied the linux boot sector over to the C: drive and altered the boot.ini file. This all works. When I boot Windows I have no problems(no extra ones that is!). When I select FC5 I get "GRUB hard disk error". So I checked out the grub.conf file, and this is what I currently have :

splashimage = (hd1,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hidemenu
Title Fedora Core (xxx)
root(hd1,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-xxx ro root=/dev/VolGroup00....
initrd /initrd-xxx
Title Other
rootnoverify(hd0,0)
chainloader +1

Any assistance will be greatly appreciated

First of all, here is my usual reference:
http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux...w2k-HOWTO.html

According to the GRUB manual, this is a Stage 1 error:
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/man...roubleshooting

As far as I understand, that means is that it doesn't matter what's in your grub.conf file, because it's not even being found by GRUB's stage 1. Grub's stage one is likely what you mean by "I have copied the linux boot sector over to the C: drive."

It seems to me that this statement from the first link above is relevant:That means that if your /boot is on sdb, then the NTLDR might not be finding it. It is quite possible to install /boot on a small partition on sda and still have the rest of FC5 on sdb.

The easiest solution probably involves reconsidering GRUB as your bootloader. It's more than capable of booting Windows, I think Windows just needs to be installed on a primary partition. If you do replace NTLDR with GRUB though, in order to be able to reinstall the NTLDR easily, simply backup your MBR and then you can restore it as if nothing happened. Google the three words backup mbr linux and you'll get plenty of ideas how to do this.

Here are some tools you'll likely find useful:
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/faq.html
http://knoppix.org/
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=362506 (you can also use the dd command to backup the MBR)

Hmmm
I think you might be on to something. I performed the operation descibed by your first link, but the version I was following neglected to say what you highlited- /boot needs to be on the ntldr drive. It is not. I will work on this and see what new errors I can make .
Thanks

Please let us know how you fare.

Well it is a rather sad tale now, and an ending is still being written. I was working on repartitioning my NTFS drive, a day to back up and a day to defrag, another to get a hold of a copy of knoppix that had the repartion tool QTparted. So it all came to a climax this morning. Got it all booted up in knoppix and ran the partition tool- BAD CLUSTERS. But thankfully I was told what to do, run checkdisk and restart- twice. Okay that works, so I reboot and viola- windows has been destroyed! wont boot due a file missing error, but alas, more helpfull hints.. rerun setup disk and run the windows recovery. Why not. So I run that and not its asking for a password I didnt know existed on XP- administrator. I dont think I have ever used THAT. I dont even remember creating it, but there was no use in arguing. So now I have nothing, or so I thought. I figured, "hey lets try and see what errors Fedora 5 can give me, since windows is a little repetitious with its missing file thing" and viola (again)- it works. I am not sure exactly what I did to get it to work, as far as I can tell all I did was inadvertantly kill windows, giving some breathing room for Fedora to spread its wings, or something like that. I suppose I should be trying to recover the windows partion, but that means starting the whole thing all over again- I would rather work on customizing and setting up my nice new FC5/64 OS.
Thanks for the help. I am sure I will need it again soon