Grub boot loader advance options
 

hi!
I am having fc4 and windowsXp both on my system.I have placed my grub
boot record in the MBR.But there was option in the grub advance boot loader options to place the record in the separate partition other than in MBR.I tried the option to place my grub boot loader into separate partition.But after this whenever i boot my system, it picks the boot record from MBR and start loading windows.It didn't give me options to load grub.How can i manage to place my grub boot record in separate drive other than in MBR and be able to load my grub when i boot my system.
thanks!

I think it goes like this:

The bios goes to the first hard drive--as defined by the boot order that you can configure. The default is the primary HD on the first bus. It looks in the mbr of this drive to see what to do next. With windows, control is passed to "ntldr" which is somewhere else on the drive.

To boot into grub on your setup, you still need **something** in the mbr that points to grub. The grub manual should show you how to do this.

Easier solution: If you dont want grub on the mbr of drive 1, just put it on a floppy.

see my tut if you want ntldr to chainload to a partition where grub is.

However it looks like you never put grub into the first detected drive's mbr so the original bootloader was never overwritten.

most linux distro install cds allow you a rescue mode to re-install the bootloader.

Note grub will chainload to ntldr which has its booting files on your c partition at the root level, the highest level....unhide system files to have a gander

If you want to have a multi-boot system you will need something other than ntldr(windows booter) in the MBR.

If I were you I would put the FC install disc #1 back in and get to the rescue console.Somewhere in the console will be the option to "re-install boot loader".Do this.Install it to the MBR.

All the Linux distros that I have tried(thats a lot) no matter if they use GRUB or Lilo have always found my win partition and automatically added win as a boot choice on restart so dont be afraid of losing win.Linux plays nice with other OS's in this regard.

If you cannot find the rescue console post back and I'll dig out my FC disc set and we'll go from there.

This is a bit of an off-topic nitpick. In windows, the boot code in the mbr loads ntldr. You can install grub in the mbr and have it chainload (to ntldr) to boot windows.
ntldr is not in the mbr in windows.

I knew someone would catch that.Sorry :rolleyes: