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Old 01-12-2005, 02:41 PM   #1
colinexl
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Registered: Oct 2003
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will installing grub to my MBR screw up anything?


Hey all, I posted a question before with no answers so I'm going to ask a different question. I have a SATA raid 0 setup running winxp and want to load Fedora. I have a separate slave drive connected to the main IDE bus so it's not involved in the raid 0. When I try to install Fedora, it doesn't recognize my Promise Fasttrak 378 controller or something because it keeps giving me errors about the two raid array drives. At the disk partitioning screen, I only see my slave hdb5 drive. It doesn't even see the raid array. BTW I have 6 drives and Fedora only sees 1. So I installed Fedora on my slave drive on the main IDE telling it to put the grub on the first boot sector of the drive (hdb5), NOT in the hda MBR fearing that it'll mess up my winxp or the raid array since it doesn't recognize the controller properly. Now when I reboot winxp loads up normally and there is no grub. I heard somewhere that I have to use a boot cd to boot into Fedora? But I'd rather not use a boot cd every time i want to use linux. Will installing grub on the MBR mess up my raid or winxp since fedora can't see my controller?
 
Old 01-13-2005, 05:49 AM   #2
shmonkey
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I think that installing grub to the mbr of your slave disk will have no effect as I assume your boot drive is your Raid drives. So that means windows will boot but Fedora won't.

Even if you did screw upo the mbr of your windows disk I think it is pretty easy to recover with a windows boot disk (something like fdisk /mbr - although that's probably wrong).

Have you considered trying alternative distro's like Suse, Ubuntu etc, they may detect your hardware better. In fact it would be worth getting a Knoppix CD and boot as a live CD - if this works you have the option to install it to the hard disk.


Regards

Shmonkey
 
Old 01-13-2005, 12:48 PM   #3
colinexl
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I did another install of fedora but this time i put it on my master drive and installed the MBR on the hda instead of the first sector of the boot disk. I can boot into fedora with a little bit of tweaking! But it's finally working but with no grub. Here is what I do, for my mobo, i can press F8 right before windows loads and a boot selector screen will appear, from that I can choose which hard drive to boot from. It works just like a grub except that I have to press the F8 at just the right time, but it's only a temporary solution, but a good one at that!
 
  


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