WINXP SP2 / FC 4 dual boot
 

I am a Linux Enthusiast, and just downloaded FC4, can't wait to put my hands on it, but i can't enable dual boot on my PC.

This is my current setup:

Dell Dimension 8200 (P4@2.4 / 512MB)

HD1 80GB (WinXP PRO SP2)
HD2 40GB (FC 4)

I have installed succesfully FC 4 on my 2nd HD (several times by the way), the last time i have disabled GRUB (Linux BootLoader) and tried to enable dual boot on my pc through NTLDR, apparently everything worked fine, i managed to create a linux.bin image and edited boot.ini on my xp, and now i get a menu where i can choose between Linux and XP.

The problem is when i select Linux, the computer hangs, nothing happens, and i get a blank screen with a blinking cursor on upper left corner of the screen.

How can I make my dualboot to work, without using 3rd party software as Partition Magic.

I'm afraid I have absolutely no experience with ntldr. Another thing you could try (if you cannot succeed in making the ntldr solution work) is to make the Linux harddrive the primary drive and the Windows drive the secondary drive. You can then install Grub on the Linux drive and boot Windows by using the "map" option in the Windows section of grub.conf, like this:
So Windows thinks it's on the primary drive (which is what it likes). This is what worked on my Windows XP/Gentoo dual boot system with two SATA drives.
Hope that helps.

Did you install Grub to “the first sector of the boot partition” before you copied the first sector of the /boot partition to linux.bin?

If not, then you need to manually run grub from rescue mode, install it to “the first sector of the boot partition” and then recreate linux.bin.

Thanks
 

Thanks for all your tips, i have tried succesfully the hard drive mapping through GRUB and worked just fine.