I have Win XP installed on my first drive, hda and FC2 installed on my 2nd drive, hdb. Currently, the Windows boot loader has control of the system, so I can't get into FC2. I had FC2 installed using GRUB, but GRUB wouldn't let me boot into Win XP... in fact it screwed up the boot partition/mbr. I fixed it with the Win XP recovery console, so now I have the Windows boot loader loading windows again.

I would like to keep my Windows boot loader and have it boot FC2. Like I mentioned above, my installations are on 2 separate physical drives and from what I've read, this makes things a bit more complicated. I've followed instructions for installing GRUB in the /boot partition of the FC2 install, which I have done. I have also created a "linux.bin" image and copied it to my C: drive along with editing my boot.ini file.

Of course the problem is, when I arrive at the Windows bootloader and select "Linux", it should hit the linux.bin file and then proceed to load GRUB, however all I get is a blank screen with a blinking cursor in the top left corner.

I've read that there is a way to run the "grub-install" with an option to tell it where stage 1 and stage 2 are located, however, I have had hard time understanding the instructions I've found so far and in fear of screwing up my partitions/boot records again, I have not attempted this.

Can someone give me simple instructions about how to get Windows boot loader to load my FC2 installation?

Thanks,
Kyle

Heres an interesting article I have found very helpful. With new versions of Grub a dual boot tends to be easy(I did it on my crappy win2k box, waiting to see if its worth it on my main one). If you made a boot floppy this will be even easier as you will read in the article(assuming you want to use the windows bootloader). Windows Xp and Windows 2000 pro both use the same loader.

Hope this helps:

http://www.littlewhitedog.com/content-52.html

Well, thats a nice article, but I still don't understand what I need to do. From what I've read, the /boot partition should usually be on the primary disk, however, in my case, its on my 3rd disk, (which is hdf now since I just installed FC2 again.) I've edited the boot.ini to tell it to book the linux.bin file on c:, but since the /boot partition isn't on the same drive, it doesn't seem to know where stage 2 of GRUB is located.

I think there is a way to get this to work, but I just haven't found simple instructions to do this. If anyone knows how, I would really appreciate it.

Hi manstretch,

well, I've had similar problem - on hda was my old dual-boot with WinXP and SuSE 7.3 and I installed SuSE 9.0 on my hdb as separate clean installation. I prefered to dual-boot from the Linux installation as dual-boot from Windows is sometimes unstable and is tricky do be done clean (I dislike the whole stuff with linux.bin and editing of boot.ini).

So here's waht I've done in my case. I hope it will give you clue of how to do it in your case.

Just keep your Win installation on hda, do not touch anything there! Then from the BIOS make your hdb (assuming hdb is the disk where your Linux installation resides) as primary boot device (if your BIOS can not do it, then my approach would not work for you!)

Boot into your Linux installation using either the installation CD/DVD or a boot diskette/CD. Open a console if not already opened, enter in superuser mode, by typing there su - provide your root password there and you're logged in as root. Edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file to contain these sections

In this example I assume you have hdb separated in two partitions:
hdb1 is the swap one and the hdb2 is the root one of your Linux installation
If this is not the case, replace the number in (hd0,1) statements with the "number - 1" of your linux root partition. Say if you have three partitions on hdb and the root one is hdb3, then the (hd0,1) statement would change in (hd0,2). The same is true for the "root=/dev/hdb2" kernel parameter, it could change in the above example as "root=/dev/hdb3".


title Linux
root (hd0,1)
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdb2
initrd (hd0,1)/boot/initrd

title Window
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1


Then issue from the console the command

grub-install --force-lba /dev/hdb

That should be, reboot and you should see the GRUB menu with the choices Linux and Windows. Each of these should take you in the corresponding OS.

Kind regards,
sbogus