Thanks for all info. I was away tonight, just got back and I'll try to fix my problem tomorrow.

Good night

Ok, update for now:

This morning I removed all non NTFS partitions from my system using partition magic and left the space just like that (on my primary slave). After that I booted from the FC4 cd again and followed all the steps as described in the manual (again). The partitioning is done by the choosing the 'automatic' paritioning option (http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/fedora...titioning.html). I only wanted to have Disk druid alter my primary slave drive, so I only selected that one. At the part where it asks for installing the bootloader, I doublechecked and made sure that the bootloader would be installed to the MBR of hda. I set my Windows XP (on hda1) as my default boot choice. So far so good, picked some other options (installing fedora as a personal desktop) and started installing again. No errors whatsoever during the process, and it asked to reboot after a while. But then the same thing happened as happened yesterday. The system simply boots to my Windows XP and does not show the Grub bootloader like it should?

I read some of the tips in this thread. There is a rescuecd for FC4, I already downloaded and burned that one, but then I'd have to use some commands.

As I understand correctly, this tells grub to install to the MBR of hda (where it already should be) and then I tell grub that my FC4 install is on hdb (does it matter that there are other partitions (non linux) on that drive as well? I really would like to know what I'm doing and not just type those commands and 'hope' for it to have a happy ending, can someone give me some more info about what to do (and especially why to it) when booting from the rescuecd?

Again: I'm a total newbie if it comes to linux, that's why I picked an 'out of the box' distro to start with. If any of you give any hints/tips please be clear about what commands to type in etc.

Many thanks in advance

Ok, so in my situation I just boot from the rescueCD

type 'grub' and hit <enter>
type 'root (hd1,0)' and hit <enter>
type 'setup (hd0)' and hit <enter>
type 'exit' and hit <enter>

after that it should install GRUB and that will show on boot? Will it then also show my Windows XP install in GRUB ??

And what does the '(hd1,0)' mean? My FC4 install is on my hdb, there already exists a ntfs partition on that before the free space .. that free space is partitioned by the FC4 installer (just looked it up with partition magic and there first is 102MB of linux ext3 and after that there is almost 15gb (rest of the free space) of type 8E ??) Do I have to alter some of the parameters in the 'root (hd1,0)' command now?

Ok, I think I fixed my problem for now. I did the booting from rescue CD, run grub, root (hd1,1), setup (hd0) and now grub shows on boot

Only 'weird' thing is that Fedora is shown twice in the bootmenu now? I'm now in windows XP to see if that still worked :P

O.K. -- First, the HD0, HD1 stuff: GRUB, like many system-level programs starts counting at zero, not one. So, if you have two drives, they are hd0 and hd1. It also counts partitions starting with zero, so, for example, the "root (hd1,1)" command specifies that the "root" is on the second partition of the second drive. Once you've started linux, that would be /dev/hdb2.

Second, what you see in the GRUB menu is what's in /boot/grub/grub.conf, which is a simple text file you can edit (if you have superuser access -- i.e., log in a root or use sudo <command> if you've set yourself up as a "sudoer")

Each time you do a "setup" in GRUB or install a new kernel, the GRUB menu is (usually) updated, and I suspect that your "duplicate" grub entry is from something like that.

Anyhow, welcome to Fedora Don't forget to run up2date fairly often -- The "Red Hat Network Alert Icon" only shown when critical updates are released.

Enjoy.