I had an existing dual boot installation with Fedora / Win98 using Grub (I believe).

After upgrading to a bigger HD, I have now XP on the master HD but would like to reactivate my Fedora installation which is now on the Slave HD.

Is it possible to get the Fedora installation working if I get the right boot sector from the Slave HD and add the file as bootsect.lnx to my XP boot.ini on the Master?

If yes, what would I have to change in Fedora, so that my bootsect.lnx will work?

Sorry, I know this would be a very lazy way but I thought I could save reinstalling everything.

28-Jun-06: I think the grub bootsector on HD did not work because I made the old harddisk a Slave. After installing Grub on a floppy and using the floppy boot sector for my XP Boot Manager everything works fine. Just had to change grub config from hd0 to hd1. Thanks for the postings but there are no changes to fstab required except for mounting my new NTFS partition.

You just need to change the /etc/fstab entries from "hda" to "hdb" and it'll work fine. It's an advantage of the "Everything is a file" approach.

Google for "NT grub boot" or "NT lilo boot" for complete instructions. There are several sites that go through how to do this.

Thanks for the posting. Sorry for the late follow up but I am flat out with other things and can still use Fedora by hiding the new harddisk.

There must be more to it than changing fstab because the 512 byte from hda that I use in XP's boot menu just creates a black screen.

I believe that "dd if=/dev/hda1 of=bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1" should have created the correct file for this purpose.

Can I actually use the XP Boot Manager on a NTFS drive to start Linux? I had the Fedora Boot Manager in the MBR of the old harddisk.