Grub won't work
 

Situation: Just installed Linux Fedora Core 3 on my computer.. When going through the installation procedures i created 3 linux drives:

/boot 1027MB (Supposed to be where to put GRUB)
/ 13.5G (Linux)
swap 1027MB Swap partition

When prompted to install a boot loader, i did, i selected GRUB (LILO wasn't an option), installed it to the /boot partition and i rebooted the machine after installation, as expected.

When the computer rebooted, GRUB didn't actuall prompt me which OS to run, for that matter no-where during the installation was i prompted to select with OS to be the default boot..

Did i miss something or screw it up somehow?

B

Welcome to the site, however you missed something.

It is in the section where you picked your bootloader options. If you pick you OS in the list and hit 'edit', 'default' will be an option in the list. Do you have another OS on this machine? If not, it wouldn't matter. It defaults to Fedora.

BTW, a 1 gig boot partition is a massive waste of space. 100meg is large enough unless you compile about 30 different kernels.

I did get that option box when installing the boot loader.. It had some wacky name for windows so i renamed it windows and it said, select the OS's that you want to be able to boot.. so i highlighted them both (windowsXPP) and then just said "ok". Was there some place special i was supposed to install the grub program?

B

I'm not familar with any dialog that asks you to select the OS you want to boot. Sorry, maybe I missed something. Usually the box just lists the OS that you have on your computer then you click 'edit' and edit what you need. For me, the box usually has Fedora Core and one called Other, which I change to Windows XP.

If you have a modern hard drive, I would install the loader to your Master Boot Record. Otherwise you can run into an issue with the loader being out of the first 1024 sectors (or whatever the number is) and the hard drive can't find it. This is especially common when the first half of the drive is already filled with another OS. Loading to the MBR takes care of this.

On another note, I've having an issue where XP is loaded on the first 40g of a 120g drive and Fedora 3 is on the back of that. Grub loads fine and I can load FC3 just fine, but when I select the option to pick XP it hangs at the grub loader screen. If I run FIXMBR from the XP CD and reboot, it just says there was an error loading the operating system. Is this what you are experiencing or are you just not getting anything? I guess I'm what asking you get when you power up? Does it give you an error messege or autoboot into XP or what?

Use fdisk to check whether you still have a Windows partition on the disk. If you do, next check grub.conf. Assuming Windows is on /dev/hda2, add these lines to the conf file, then reboot.

title=Windows
root (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1