Hi I have windows xp on my harddrive and I added Fedora on a seperate partition. While trying to add a sharing partition for some reason my bootloader stopped working and I could not access either fedora or windows. So I got mandriva on a pendrive and booted to try to fix it from that. So I ended up adding mandriva so i could use its bootloader to access windows and fedora, but I cant boot fedora. I was wondering if anyone could help me add this correctly.

Thanks

When you boot Mandriva, what is the output of "fdisk -l"?

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 5099 40957686 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 5100 19457 115330635 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 5100 7902 22515066 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 7903 19457 92815506 83 Linux

Thanks for the reply. What is the contents of "/boot/grub/menu.lst" on the Mandriva installation? It may be named "/boot/grub/grub.conf".

It says permission denied even though I am in root. Any suggestions?

Looks like you have 3 partitions: sda1 is a Windows partition (~40GB), while sda5 (~22GB) and sda6 (~92GB) are both Linux partitions.
Where did you create your "sharing" partition?
Your original partitions may still be intact!
Try mounting the partitions to see if they are the original one.
You can try re-installing Grub so that it boots to those two partitions (do a search for how to do this).

Don't know about the permissions problem, but then I haven't looked at Mandy in forever - try "cat /boot/grub/menu.lst". If that works post the output of (reduces the output).
Also, what does "df -hT" produce ???

The sharing partition never got made so I dont have that one. I am pretty sure the data is still there its just that I cant get it to boot from grub so i cant access it at all.

I think all you really need to do is
1)boot from a rescue cd;
2)determine which partition (sda5 or sda6) has your original /boot partition;
3)re-install grub by running grub-install and then setup your grub environment (do a search for grub-install for specifics).

Are you sure you are running with root permissions? Run "whoami" to verify this. You can alway run "sudo cat ..." if you are not root, or run "sudo bash" to get a session as root.

yes it verified I am in root

[root@localhost guest]# df -hT
Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5 ext2 22G 1.4G 19G 7% /



[root@localhost guest]# cat/boot/grub/menu.lst
bash: cat/boot/grub/menu.lst: No such file or directory

Put a space after "cat". And also look for "/boot/grub/grub.conf".

[root@localhost guest]# cat /boot/grub/menu.lst
timeout 30
color black/cyan yellow/cyan
gfxmenu (hd0,4)/boot/gfxmenu
default 0

title linux
kernel (hd0,4)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=linux root=/dev/sda5 vga=788
initrd (hd0,4)/boot/initrd.img

title linux-nonfb
kernel (hd0,4)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=linux-nonfb root=/dev/sda5
initrd (hd0,4)/boot/initrd.img

title failsafe
kernel (hd0,4)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=failsafe root=/dev/sda5 failsafe
initrd (hd0,4)/boot/initrd.img

title windows
root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1



[root@localhost guest]# /boot/grub/grub.conf
bash: /boot/grub/grub.conf: No such file or directory

Log in to Mandriva and as root create a mount point for Fedora:

mkdir /mnt/fedora

Then mount it:

mount -t ext3 /dev/sda6 /mnt/fedora

Change to that directory:

cd /mnt/fedora/boot/grub/

Then run the command:

cat menu.lst

Copy the fedora entries to the Mandriva /boot/grub/menu.lst file.