I have started with 9, and now have gone to 8, hearing it was less problematic. When I get to the end of the install, I get the congratulations screen and the reboot button.

That is it. I do not have a chance to set up boot to Winxp or Linux. When I hit the reboot button I go back to XP. I have installed partition magic, and also PQboot. When I boot to the Linux partitoin I get the screen the screen that tells me the machine is preparing to load Linux and that is where she sits. Forever.

Can someone help??????

From what I read it takes a little work to install PQboot to boot linux. Did you put Fedora boot loader in the root directory? Personally I would uninstall PQboot and install the default Fedora boot loader and let if set up the dual boot automatically.

I would also suggest to use Fedora's default boot loader (GRUB) as it is known to work on dual boot setups. Partioning is a nice thing to do, but I have come to prefer putting each operating system on it's own hard disk - hard disks are quite affordable these days.

Linux Archive

PMagic was something I thought I needed before I realized that Linux had its own partition capabilities. PQ boot is something I used when Linux would not give me the option to dual boot.

I have a 30gb drive set up as an IDE drive(win XP) and I have one 180gb drive and two 250gb drives configured as SATA drives(for linux).

It would not hurt my feelings at all to do away with PM and PQ as long as I could retain the windows OS for my wife until she learns the Linux system.

But I am back to my problem that I do not get the chance to set up Linux boot loader. I get to the end of the installation and the only option I have is to reboot, without allowing me the chance to config grub. Do you think PM and PQ is keeping me from getting the grub config option?

Will windows boot now? Is Fedora the first Linux distro you are trying to use? To help you step by step a live linux cd distro would be nice but we may be able to work through without it.

Yes, windows does boot up and runs fine if I remove the Live linux CD.

Here is where I am at to this point. I removed PQboot.

I put in the Live Linux DVD and went into rescue mode. After going through the string of questions it gave me this error:

"Error trying to mount some or all of your system"

/mnt/runtime done disabling/dev/loop
/proc/bus/usb done
/proc done
/dev/pts done
/sys done
/tmp/ramfs done
/selinux done
/mnt/systemimage done

Then I received "sh=32

Reading the post from "gonzalo76" regarding "How to install GRUB on the MBR" I continued:

I typed :grub

I recieved the promt: grub>

So I typed: find/boot/grub/stage1

I received "-error 27 unrecognized command.

I installed first:

"Fedora-9-x86_64-Live-KDE.iso"

this did not work so I installed:

"Fedora-8-x86_64-DVD.iso"

Copied both to my hard drive on my laptop and burned images to DVD.

Ok what you need is to use partition magic to format your linux partition to ext2 or ext3. Fedora is not considered 'live'. All of the live cds will run with your memory and install to disk later. That is one of the beauties of a live cd is to have a linux system to that will run independent of your hds in which you can do your repairs. Now back to your problem when you get your hds formated try installing Fedora again in the partition and when you get to the option put grub into the mbr and everything should work out if your dvds are good.

Yes, I had it partitioned before loading Fedora. It is partioned as such:

Disc 1
local diskC) Fat32 24,795 active primary
(*) Unallocated 3,828 one primary

Disc2
local disc(*) linuxExt3 196, active primary
local disc(*) Type 8E 152, none primary
(*) unalocated 152, none primary

Win xp is on disc 1.

Disc 1(30gb) is connected as an IDE drive, and disc two is 3 drives(160gb, 250gb, & 250gb) connected to the SATA ports.

And as I said, the formating of disc 1 and 2 was formated prior to loading linux. During the load of linux it said that my DVD was good.

The easiest way I can advise is to download a live cd such as knoppix or Mepis or Puppy or any from distro watch that meet your eye so that you can give us an 'fdisk -ls' from terminal as root.

When I am in the format screen, do I want to add the drive with windows, or should I uncheck this one?

I am not familiar with the screen you are talking about. I would think if it says 'add the drive with windows' it means to set up a dual boot. You should wait for someone else to help you. I would hate to give you advice that will wipe windows.

It is during installation when you set up the drives for formating. The screen has all your drives listed, , all of which are checked by default, and in my paticular instance I have a total of 4 drives. One IDE and three SATA. My IDE drive is where I have windows. I have not before, as I fear losing all the files on the windows drive, but this may be why I am having trouble.

In most installations, the last thing you do is install the bootloader and this generally defaults to mbr of first drive. This would be the drive you have windows on. If you did not install Grub to the mbr you will need to manually edit your windows boot files to have an entry for Fedora8 because windows will not recognize it. Most Linux distros will automatically detect the windows partition and put an entry but I don't think Fedora does. It's a simple matter to put an entry in the grub.conf file for windows, at least compared to what you need to do to get an entry in the windows boot files.

Best starting point is to post the results of the 'fdisk -l' command suggested above.

"When I am in the format screen, do I want to add the drive with windows, or should I uncheck this one?"
Your question above, are you referring to a screen you get during the Linux install? If it's asking you to select partitions to format, you'll lose all your data on windows but I am not sure which screen you are referring to either.