I installed Fedora 4 to my third hard drive, which appears to have gone great, except I cant load into it.

In the install options, i selected automatically partition, and to install grub to my main hard drive /dev/hda1

so when the PC boots on HDD-0 it goes straight to windows
if i select HDD-1 it gets to GRUB,

nothing else, on my screen after that, just the standard second page of the POST and

GRUB

no space, no blinking cursor, no nothing, cant type into it, machine beeps, ive gone away and made dinner (two hour long task for me)

nothing, just dead.

Please help

Should probably have been /dev/hda - that would have installed into the MBR. What you've done is install it into the first partition on the first disk.
Normally that's where Windows would be - or a vendor recovery partition.
Get into recovery mode, and re-install grub to the MBR - presuming that's what you really intended.

that sounds good, can you just reiterate how I would do that, recovery mode in Linux Isnt a problem, or in windows for the recovery console,

i am TOTALLY new to the world of linux

I just checked, my apologies its installed to /dev/hda

anyone have ideas?

can anyone help at all, please?

Please don't bump your own threads before a 24 hour period has elapsed (LQ rules).

Boot from the first installtion disc and type "linux-rescue" at the boot prompt. You will need to enter details of your Fedora Core root partition and then do "cd /mnt/sysimage", then "grub-install /dev/hda".

ok, done what you suggested and after the grub install /dev/hda i immidiatley get a grub prompt which will be needing some input..

.... so, the question is, now what, what do i do, i didnt know what to do so i just plain rebooted and it went straight into windows, no prompt, should i have changed my boot to HDD-1 to get grub or do i need to set this up

added information:

tried booting with bios set to HDD-1 instead of HDD-2

GRUB prompt appears but freezes as before.

Now getting upset

Edit: Sorry didnt realise there was an edit button

question... dont you get options at all to select the different OS for dual boot> and am asmuing you have a dual booting system?

if not and you only getting a console moode

At grup try typing the following "chainloader +1" then press enter/return without the quotes and see what happens

Okay... lessee...

(0) Stop. Don't panic. Take a deep breath. Look around. This problem is new and mystifying right now but it's actually not terribly serious; certainly not terribly uncommon. Your data is probably perfectly safe. But you need to clearly establish what the situation is, and what you are going to do about it, before you proceed. Get out a pencil and a legal-pad and start making notes. Force yourself to stop, and don't panic.

(1) Boot to a LiveCD. This gets you into a Linux environment where you can "look around."

(2) Read carefully and completely: info grub. Do not neglect this. Do not simply "read as little as possible and then rush off and try it." Your computer will wait.

(3) The thing that will determine which boot-loader gets run is the master boot record (MBR), which the normal Grub install process will write for you. The BIOS searches for MBRs and runs the first one that it finds. The MBR, in turn, runs the boot loader. Notice that the BIOS can search several devices, as stipulated in its "Setup" screen. (Go look at that, and write down what you find on your legal-pad.)

(4) grub needs to find a /grub directory on the boot partition and certain files in it. When it finds them, it can display a nice menu. It also has a set of commands that you can use if the menu is, say, ed...

(5) There are specific instructions about how to boot Windows from Grub.