I need help desperately!
 

I installed RH 8.0 on my second hard drive. On my first hard drive is XP. When i reboot, I get the red hat OS selection screen. It only list Linux and DOS. Nothing about XP. I'm using Grub to boot, but it seems as if from what i've read LILO is the way to go. I'm totally new and want to learn RH can someone tell me what i'm missing. I'm typing this on RH8.0 so everythign is working fine from that aspect! HELP :(

First of all it would be wise to make the subjects of your thread a little more informative then 'I need help desperately!'.

When you choose DOS does it boot to XP? That is just grubs default name for any windows type file system it recognizes. You can easily change DOS to WindowsXP or whatever you want it to say.

sry i'm new here, but thanks for the reply. Whne i choose dos, it boots to a screen that says dos, then chainloader +1 and just sits there, and does nothing

Okay well there is probably a problem with your grub.conf file. Could you post the contents of it? It is in /boot/grub/grub.conf

Here it is :)
# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
# root (hd0,0)
# kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hda2
# initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hdb
default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Red Hat Linux (2.4.18-14)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.18-14 ro root=LABEL=/ hdd=ide-scsi
initrd /initrd-2.4.18-14.img
title windowsxpDOS
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Ummm...so you say that XP is on the first disk and RedHat on the second. It seems by your grub.conf that RedHat is located on the first hard disk and first partition(hd0,0).

Well I'm not sure exactly what that 'makeactive' line does but I know I don't have it in my grub.conf . Under the 'title windowsxpDOS' it shows that windows XP is on the second hard disk and the first partition(hd1,0) Is that where it is?

well damn.... i guess you are right. XP is the second, and linux is the first..... I didn't change any of that so it must be right. The make active and the windows xpdos was put there by me. It was on a post that I read about the same issue. The person asking the question never said if it worked or not..so I tried it.....

Just to make sure type

df

in a shell and post the output.

for fear of sounding stupid or giving the wrong info, how do I pull up a shell?

Are you using KDE or GNOME? Look for something that says SHELL or TERMINAL or an icon that has a shell on it. Its the thing that comes up that you type commands in.

bro you rock..i appreciate all of your help! here is the output

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2 37318128 1614204 33808256 5% /
/dev/hda1 101089 9379 86491 10% /boot
none 256724 0 256724 0% /dev/shm
[root@dhcppc1 root]#

So redhat boots fine but XP doesn't. Did you take out the makeactive line and then reboot and try it again?

yes i did ....it only goes to that screen with Linux and windowsxpdos listed and when I select windows.. i just get nothing!

how do i switch to lilo to boot instead of grub? Do you think this would help?

Switching to lilo won't help. Your going to have to find out exactly where XP is installed.