I installed fedora2 on a seperate hd then my winXp. when I want to boot up into Linux I hit F12 and tell it to boot under the other hd.
sometimes it works like a charm and I am able to run linux.
but most of the time I try to boot and it takes me to a screen that has some writing at the top with a prompt that looks like this:

grub >

when I hit the tab button it displays some command options.

any help would be nice.
thanks

Well, this is the grub command prompt. All you have to do is...

type

root (hd1)

or something similar

root (hd
and then hit tab to see the possibilities. Choose the harddisk or partition where your root partition for linux resides.

then type

kernel /boot/vmlinuz

or whatever your kernel is named under the /boot directory

finally type

boot

if you chose the proper root partition or disk then your system will boot.

as for getting the system to use the grub menu when you want to boot, do some googling to find that out.

Actually root is asking for the partition on which /boot resides not / . Although they are usually the same unless you have a /boot partition. Also, the kernel line differs depending on whether you have a /boot partition.

kernel /boot/kernelname <without separate /boot partition>

kernel /kernelname <with separate /boot partition>

Thanks for the clarification. I had noticed those differences when I originally was looking into grub myself, but never realized why they were written differently.