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Old 11-21-2004, 02:49 AM   #1
Black-Magoat
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Registered: Nov 2004
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Not able to boot at all.. :(


I've recently installed a Red Hat 7.3 system on my computer. I have a 40 gb hard drive on witch I have a 10 gb partition for a Windows XP system. I let the instalation wizard to automatically partition the 30gb left. At that point I got the error message that The bootloader may not support my hard drive arhitecture (have no idea what that means), so I made a boot disk. Unfortunately , as I expected, The Red Hat system did not boot, and the boot disk didn't help either, as I got an error : 'Failed to boot. Please change disks and try again'. I realy need help on this one. 10x
 
Old 11-21-2004, 03:08 AM   #2
Zuggy
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I have no idea what went wrong. But I can tell you how to boot into linux.

Pop CD 1 into your drive and when you get the prompt that says press 'enter' to install type the following

Code:
linux root=/dev/hda2
You will need to change the hda part depending on what the partition designation was (hda1 hda2 hda3) for the / (root) partition.

If for some reason Red Hat 7.3 doesn't have a prompt like that (I've never used it) theoretically any Linux install disk should work for this.
 
Old 11-21-2004, 05:23 AM   #3
chakkerz
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umm

i'm gonna go out on a limb here, but you installed Windows XP first right ?
When you installed it, you didn't tell it to use NTFS right ? because if you did, there is the first problem right there. That shouldn't stop linux from booting though.

You may have killed the MBR, in which case i wish you all the best, recoviring your windows stuff won't be a problem, getting your linux happening will. First up, i'd re-install Linux, tell it to install the boot loader to the mbr - Red Hat 7.3 is circa-WinXP, so i don't know if that will co-exist happily, i remember it being a big problem for me (i also remember removing redhat 7.3 after 15 minutes because it didn't want to accept my gfx card while MDK didn't mind it).

If you start from scratch:
Consider a new version of linux. salvage your windows XP data (backups if you haven't got any), then re-install windows, and create a single 10GB windows partition (use Fat 32, it is more likely to work, let linux take care of the rest later). Install linux and put the bootloader into the MBR (after confirming via google or something, that it will work for the distro you're using and windows XP), then, just to be safe, make boot floppy, during the installation process.

If that doesn't work (ie linux still won't boot) investigate the dd command, to get the boot sector of the linux partition into a file and editing boot.ini in windows, to use the NT boot loader, you will do this after booting from the bootfloppy.

Last edited by chakkerz; 11-21-2004 at 05:27 AM.
 
  


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