I have a Fujitsu Siemens laptop and have been trying for a while to install Linux on it along with Windows XP Home.

The problem is I install windows no problem and Linux no problem. The problem is when the install is complete and I reboot, all I get is GRUB in the corner of the screen and nothing else. Pressing any keys has no effect and it won’t even let me use my XP CD to boot I had to create a boot floppy on CD and wipe the drive.

I have tried Suse, Mandrake and Red Hat/Fedora, but it happens with all of them. I have partitioned the drive with Fdisk, Partition Magic and the drive options in XP setup, but all with the same results. I read somewhere that you should use a boot floppy instead, but I don’t have a floppy drive and don’t fancy creating a another boot CD.

Any advise in this problem would be appreciated as I am about to give up and stick with windows.

Hi,

if I were you, I would try installing BootMagic (comes with PartitionMagic, which you have mentioned to own).
If BootMagic doesn't work, then problem isn't on GRUB side, but if it works, you can then install Linux distro that is not sticked to GRUB (Slackware, Gentoo,...), as you would do normally, except installing bootloader to boot partition (not MBR). Then re-run bootmagic configuration and add your linux boot partition to setup, save changes, restart and you should be running.

Look at this page:

http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/fujitsu.html

Pick out your model and see if the link has any info on this problem...

Cheers,

Mark

Thanks, I'll give this a try and let you know how i get on.

hi
altough this looked weird to me but then i have seen such a problem at my friend's desktop board
we could not move the keybouar up+down at grub/lilo
and could not figure out what went wrong
ultimately what i found out was that ,the mothrboard(intel 815)did not allow to mke a selection untill we were passing the bios witha pssword.
earlier there was no password at startup in BIOS and we had this problem,now we hae to kep a password,si that bios allows us to make a selection.
and this was not for that time only it has been going for many linux distributions and lilo+grub

so u too check out for this

regards