Hi,

I know this general theme pops up again and again but I seem to be having trouble finding and working out the correct partitions, and right now I can't access either of my windows drives.

To start with I had two windows installations on seperate partitions on one serial ATA drive.

Win2k (primary partition)
WinXP-64 (secondary partition)

I'd been wanting to mess with Linux for a while so I decided to download a distro and try it out.

I've installed Fedora 4 on a seperate 14gb drive out of an old system, as to not mess up my windows installations. However, after installation it appears that it HAS in fact messed up my windows installs, which leaves me with a big problem.

Win2k and xp64 don't even play nice together!

I'm assuming nothing has been overwritten except what was required to install GRUB, however I get the standard failure to load, the system just displays the last few lines of grub.conf and nothing happens.

i've tried editing it around and keep getting the " Error 1 : Filename must be either an absolute pathname or blocklist" and i'm more or less at my wit's end here. It's not that I feel anything is particularly broken - just way too fiddly!

Here is my grub.conf

and here is the results of fdisk -l

Basically, I need to work out where /dev/sda1 is as far as GRUB is concerned, correct?

Many thanks in advance, and i'm sorry to ask for help on such a well-covered topic.

chainloader +1

is the correct syntax.

Well, i made the edit, rebooted and no joy. after selecting "windows" as the boot option i just see the last two lines of grub.conf and then nothing happens :-/

can you post your /boot/grub/device.map

so i assume it was pointing to the correct place..

thanks for taking the time to look it over

Try adding:

map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)

before chainloader +1

Or try this:

title Windows
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader (hd1,0)+1

Add the following to the Windows stanza before the chainloadWatch the blanks between parameters.

Excellent - it all works perfectly!

Now what you suggested was simply telling GRUB to swap the HDD mapping over? I'd just like to know what I just did and why, that's all

Many thanks

Yup. Windows prefers to be the first HD. So you just fake it out by telling grub to pass on a bit (or byte?) that says it is indeed the first HD...

Linux doesn't care which drive it is which is why typically in dual boot setups you'll find people recommend you install windows on the first partition of the first drive and then install linux after...

You can try to get into the grub command mode and

rootnoverify (hd1,<tab>)
Hitting tab will show you the partitions
chainloader +1
boot