I'm not sure, the last time I installed I selected GRUB to be put on hda. However, perhaps in naivte, I have told the installer to put GRUB on hdb before. Will this be a problem, and how can I double check from the bash prompt? Thanks again for the quick responses and all the help.

hi
do one thing
make ur prmiary master as primary slave and vice versa(hda===hdb)
and then install grub on hda


regards
gaurav

Do I need to physically switch the hard drives, or will using the grub map command thing mentioned earlier do the trick? I didn't really understand what the intention of the suggestion about the map command was before, but after looking around a bit I think the idea is to make it think the slave is the master and vice versa. Another quick question before I actually try it... forgive my newbishness, but I want to make sure do either of these things (the physical switch or just the switch through the prompt) will not wipe out any of the data/programs/etc. that's already on my XP partitions? And is there another way of doing the switch that you had in mind?

Thanks again for the quick help.

hi
i haven' t used any map command

what u can do is remove ur windows Xp drive physically(remove the power cord from it)

then keep just ur linux drive as primary master
see if grub runs fine on that, reinstall grub if required

and try out variuos things,at least ur windows Xp drive has been removed so need not worry about that.....

if this works out
keep us posted

regards
gaurav

I tried three things, none of which worked.
1)First I disconected my original master (the one with XP) and made my original slave the master. Trying to boot with only the second hard drive gave me the following:

Error loading Operating System

2)Second I disconnected my original slave (the one with FC2, 80GB) and tried booting with only my 60GB with XP as the master; this yielded the same problem that I've been having:

GRUB_

All it prints is GRUB with the blinking underscore

3)Last I tried switching the two, making the slave the master and the master the slave. This gave the same results as the first try:

Error loading Operating System

(all three times I still could get to the linux rescue mode if I wanted to)

I'm going to switch back to the original state since none of these seemed to yield an improvement (60GB w/XP = master; 80GB w/FC2 = slave).

BTW, before making the switch I tried editing my grub.conf file to look like this:

default=1
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd1,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Fedora Core (2.6.5-1.358)
root (hd1,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.5-1.358 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.5-1.358.img
title DOS
map (hd0) (hd1)
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1

but it did not change anything. Did I use the map command correctly, did I misunderstand something, or did it not do anything because I can't get to the GRUB screen in the first place? Anyways, I've changed grub.conf back to how I posted it earlier, so basically I'm back where I started . At least I've learned a few things along the way so far though. Thanks for the help thus far.

Any other ideas/pointers would be much appreciated.

Sorry to double post but some new developements...

maybe I mistyped before, or it just didn't work for whatever reason, but I tried installing grub again using:

grub-install /dev/hda

and it worked, sort of. Running the above it told me the installation finished with no errors reported. It also told me my /boot/grub/device.map looks like this:

#generated by anaconda
(fd0) /dev/fd0
(hd0) /dev/hda
(hd1) /dev/hdb

and said that if it is wrong (the device.map) that I should edit it, and run the grub-install command again.

After I installed it I rebooted and got the following:

GRUB Loading Stage 1.5.

GRUB loading, please wait...
Error 21

and it hung right there, any ideas? I'm going to be looking around for solutions to this new (to me at least) Error 21 in GRUB.

In case you didn't read the previous post I basically said physically switching the harddrives in any way didn't seem to work.

Thanks again for the help so far, hoping to still get help.

hi
the eror is coming because it is looking for hd1--primary slave but we have made the slave as mster
so put on Xp drive as master again

and with xp as master and other a slave
again run the above command and post the output here

regards
gaurav

Actually I had already switched it back to XP=master, FC2=slave, before I ran grub-install.

According to http://www.uruk.org/orig-grub/errors.html Error 21 during Stage 1.5 is:

So...I'm still not sure what to do, still looking though. Any other ideas? Help is much appreciated.

hi
what i think may be the problem is
the "dell utility" u have

regards

I had this problem with my Dell when I got my 2nd hard drive. When you boot up, go into setup (F2). Go down to the hard drive options. Is there an entry for your second hard drive? If not, change the entry for your second hard drive to "auto", the save and reboot. All should work well.

hi

if tha above post works then this implies was dell not detecting ur hard drive????quite frustating.....

hope the above solves ur problem

regards
gaurav

Oh so very many thanks . This has indeed solved the problem. For any future people looking at this to solve a similar problem:

Situation:

Dualboot XP/FC2
XP on hda
FC2 on hdb

Symptoms:

prints the following after BIOS-

GRUB_

Solution:

In BIOS setup make sure your second drive is recognized. If not change it to AUTO (select the second hard drive, press <Enter>, cycle through options until AUTO is selected). Then save/exit and reboot and it should work.

Thanks for all the help, and happy hunting .

hi there
generally we do not have this setting from the bios of not detecting the hdd, it is usually set to auto

but this was a learning experience ,WILL see to it that this does not pose any problems.. further
regards