Just installed Fedora Core 6 on my 80 GB drive and have my XP Professional on my 120GB drive. Both are SATA. XP is the primary drive while the other SATA is the new Fedora installation. I thought the installation went fine, but when I rebooted, right after the POST all I got was the word "GRUB" and a flashing cursor in the upper left corner. After this the system just freezes. No prompt, no Fedora and no XP. I had to go into the recovery console from my windows installation CD and did a fixmbr, fixboot, and bootcfg /rebuild to get my XP back. I am reluctant to try a reinstall again of Fedora, I was hoping it was something simple.

From the Fedora install CD I went into the linux rescue and did chroot /mnt/sysimage
also tried
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
and got an Error 15:File not found
when it most certainly was there. grub.conf seems to check out too. When I try to do a grub-install /dev/sdb but it saids it does not have any corresponding BIOS drive. I may be wrong here, but do I have to install grub onto /dev/sda ??? I really don't want it screw my Windows partition up. No matter what I do I still get that "GRUB" and flashing cursor. I basically overwrote my old FC4 (at the time I was using LILO) with FC6 but don't know if it is a Fedora problem or not. I would be very grateful for any help. I tried searching online and found many people have had the same problem but their solutions don't work, or just don't apply to my computer.

there are a number of solutions so bear with me

You will need to note that I assume your /etc/fstab table is correct for the linux sata drive and Xp has a c partition of (hd0,0)

read my tutorial please to grasp the grub speak

A) bios detects sata 1 which is Xp data drive and its mbr produces 2 solutions

sol 1
mbr has ntldr in it which can be made to chainload linux
use the tutorial on how ntldr can chainload to linux
in summary....install linux grub into the root partition of its /boot partition
take an image of it and link it to your boot.ini file

sol 2
mbr has grub which jumps to its booting files on sata 2 and can chainload xp

means that you re-install grub , make sure that the /boot/grub/menu.lst has this

title xp
root (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

title linux
root (hdX,Y).....not enough info given in your post to be explicit
kernel ....ditto
initrd .....ditto


you can post the output of your /boot if you have a live cd and your /etc/fstab if you are struggling


The disadvantage of solution 2 is that if there is trouble xp tends to want to stuff up the bootloader and rewrite the mbr of the xp drive.

so


B) leave the mbr of xp drive alone

use a live cd to install grub into mbr of drive 2...the linux one

then

solutions vary.....if your mobo allows you to select boot order sata 2 ahead of sata 1 your will get (3) if not (4) applies

(3) grub detected....use a live cd to edit the hd numbers and the map commands as per tutorial as

bios jumps to linux mbr jumps to sata 2 /boot/grub booting files

so xp drive is now hd1 and not hd0....so the map commands apply

your windows will look something like this in menu

title xp
root (hd1,0)....no longer hd0
map (hd1,0) (hd0,0)
map (hd0,0) (hd1,0)....assuming /boot is on first linux partition
makeactive
chainloader +1

title linux
root (hd0,0)....assumption as above
kernel not enough info
initrd ditto


4) bios can not jump to linux sata drive first so swap sata cables

double check with a live cd that you put grub into the linux mbr and not overwrite your precious xp bootloader, heh heh

as per tut

terminal commmands are
su
grub
root (hd0,0)....assuming grub is in first partition
setup (hd0)
quit

then edit the new sata first drive....now linux /boot/grub/menu.lst file to reflect linux is hd0 and xp is hd1 and use the map commands as above