I've been searching diligently for a solution for the hours and hours to no avail...

I had a successful dual-boot on my machine that came with a pre-installed Windows XP and then partitioned my harddrive so that I could install two distributions of Linux (in addition to windows). I successfully installed Red Hat Fedora Core 3 and the GRUB bootloader worked like a charm between FC3 and WinXP.

Then I installed Mandrake Linux 10.0 onto 2 ext3 partitions (a boot & root). After installation, my FC3 Grub bootloader no longer loads up and is replaced by Mandrake's bootloader which only includes options to boot Mandrake versions and WinXP - does not include FC3 as an option. (During the Mandrake installation, I even attempted to chose "Skip" when asked if I want to install a bootloader.)

My primary goal is to get my FC3 Grub bootloader back. (Secondary is getting Mandrake to show up on that bootloader in addition to FC3 and WinXP.)

TIA

Follow the instruction in this thread.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=301328

If you still have problem, let me know

Thanks for your suggestion! That really helped me to better understand the problem and the boot process, although my problem still exists.

I tried to locate Mandrake's menu.lst in /boot/grub/ but it does not exist. It appears that Mandrake is using LILO as the contents of /etc/lilo.conf would suggest. Now, I'm not sure if it installed the bootloader on the MBR or the boot partition I assigned it. How can I find out what's on the MBR? I would like GRUB (installed with FC3) to be the primary loader for my boot ups and get rid of LILO.

I tried reinstalling Mandrake, formatting the boot and root partitions I designated for it, and installed GRUB as the boot loader onto the Mandrake boot partition, and made sure that the configuration selected GRUB as the bootloader. (I originally choose "skip" to the bootloader installation because I wanted to use FC3's GRUB already in place... so I thought... ) I then tried to find /boot/grub/menu.lst, and it still wasn't there, so I suspect it's still booting from LILO.

Thanks again for your help and look forward to some more!

Fuggin' GUI installers ...
And the developers (of course) know better than any mere bloody user.

*NOT*

Two sets of the above makes things a bloody sight worse - especially as said developers appear to refuse to even contemplate those users might want to look at some other distro.

If you are confident that Mandrake installed where you indicated (and why the fsck shouldn't it ????) I would suggest booting FC3 into recovery and rebuilding grub.
Probably won't find Mandy (see rant above).

You'll need to add (grub) directives to locate the Mandrake /boot and / {root}.

In case you missed the subtlety, I am not in favour of installers that don't allow me to do what i want - or need.

One thing you can do - if you want to return to your Fedora boot manager is this...


Lets say your Windows partition is /dev/hda1

Your Fedora partition is /dev/hda2

and your Mandrake partition is /dev/hda3


1) In Mandrake mount your Fedora partition
a) (as root) create a mounting point: mkdir /mnt/fedora
b) mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/fedora

2) chroot to be "inside" Fedora: chroot /dev/hda2

3) restore your Fedora bootloader
a) cd /mnt/fedora/etc/grub (you might have to check the path - that's from memory)
b) grub-install /dev/hda

You should be back with your Fedora bootloader.

NOTE : Before you reboot - open up the Mandrake /etc/menu.lst file and copy the Mandrake boot-up lines then open up your Fedora /etc/grub.conf file and paste them into that. That way you will also have a Mandrake option on your bootloader.

Please note I have written this at work without access to my Linux box so this is from memory. I have not therefore checked these instructions. If I have made a mistake I apologise.

Hope that helps

Mark

You guys are awesome! I reinstalled grub from my FC3 as recommended, and got my Fedora booting again!

As I mentioned, Mandrake by default on the installation must have installed LILO boot loader (and does not have the grub menu.lst file). I spent way too long on this damned thing, and don't feel like spending more time figuring out how to translate the LILO.conf directives to the Grub's menu.lst.

I agree that this who boot loader installation could have been designed much more efficiently to avoid these headaches. At least, now I'm confident enough to know what to do. Funny how the boot loader has no problems automatically writing the bootup option for windows, but not for other distros.

I'm just going to format the Mandrake partition and start over.

Thanks again to all of you for making my Windows to Linux conversion a rewarding one!!!