Newbie Troubles: Can't get RHEL-5 Server to Dual Boot with Win 7
 

Good evening ladies and gentlemen!

I have been flummoxed by a problem that has been quite vexing. I've been trying to dual boot various distros of Linux with Win 7. So far, I've successfully dual-booted Ubuntu 9.10 and Win 7. However, I was able to recently get my hands on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 Server from work and wanted to install it on my desktop at home.

Well, I have a computer with 2 x 500 gb hard drives. I had removed my Software RAID settings when I had installed Ubuntu, so no problem there (Ubuntu is no longer on the computer, just Win 7). I manually create my paritions in Windows 7 and put in the DVD and reboot... get the RHEL installation screens, input installation code and get to the partition manager. Immediately, the first weird thing I notice is that it does not recognize the partition I created! Hmm... oh well, I decide to create a new partition using the RHEL partition manager, install it, and voila! After about 20 mins, installation is complete and I reboot my computer.

Well, much to my horro, the GRUB boot loader does not boot... it starts to load windows. However, even worse is that windows doesn't even boot! I get the dread blue screen of death as I'm loading windows! This is strange. I reboot, and get the same exact results. Well, as this is a computer I use for test purposes only, I delete my current setup and re-install windows. Try same methodology by installing RHEL-5, and again I get the same errors. This time, I wipe out my current setup and decide to install RHEL-5 only (no Win 7). Go through the process, create a parition, and reboot. It can't load RHEL-5! GRUB for some reason does not load again. I get the black screen with the blinking white cursor, and it spits out the output "GRUB" but stops there. Won't go any further!

I'm at a loss for ideas here as to why RHEL-5 is averse to booting on my system. Just to test it out, I installed Win 7 again and created a partition, but this loaded by Ubuntu 9.10 install disk. Ubuntu read the partition fine (I had 32 gb free space) but when I tried RHEL-5 it did not recognize the 32 gb free space. Maybe something wrong here?

Anyway, if anyone has suggestions as what to do, I would be very grateful. Thank you all.

hey! you wrote too much!

well i had a similar problem with fedora.

i can give you a working setting, it worked on fedora and should work on redhat too!!!!

install win 7 on your harddisk and leave/create free space for redhat.
Check your installation, win7 should work well.

later while installing redhat make a partition of say 200mb and mount /boot on it and create another partition, i tried using LVM, may work without LVM too and mount / over it now your harddisk structure shud look like similar to this:

install grub on MBR and it should boot win7 and redhat both.

i hope having separate boot partition (preferably primary partition) will solve your problem.

all the best :)

Sounds like a plan! As I'm a newbie, I'm not sure how to make an LVM partition, but I'm sure I could figure it out!

Thanks for the advice, will give it a shot and hopefully all goes well!

if you are using Red Hat ( rhel 5.4) it IS NOT FREE
pay for the updates and access to the software repos and tech support
then call them on the phone .

---- or ---------
install the free version CentOS 5.4
http://www.centos.org/

I know it's not free. I got the install code from the admin's at my work.