Can anyone please help me dual boot Fedora Core Three and Windows XP?

I've done 14 diff. ways, and none have worked. They keep booting Windows!

I have been able to dual boot Win2k and FC3, but not WinXP and FC3.

Please help!

First a few questions for you:

1) Do you already have both OS's installed?
2) ARe you using XP's bootloader or GRUB?
2a) Can you post your grub.conf?

If you can't even get into linux, but have it installed... here is what I would do.

Grab your FC3 Disks, and boot off of the CD. Boot using the command
Let Anaconda do it's thing, and make sure that you mount your disks as read-write (Anaconda should ask you about this option), then issue the following command
Now, open up /boot/grub/grub.conf using your favorite editor (VI!!!)

Add the following Lines
where X is the hard disk number, and Y is the partition number. IE: Disk 1, Parition 2 (/dev/hda2) = root(hd0,2)

Finally, if everything checks out, issue the command were X is the hard disk.

This is by no means a comprehensive guide to fixing GRUB. I would also check out the GRUB Manual @ http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/html_node/

Good luck!

I installed GRUB on the MBR, but XP keeps booting.

I'll try booting into rescue.

This is how I did it with Fedora/Win2k

Installed Win2k - left unpart. space. Installed Fedora manually and installed Grub on /boot. Windows would boot. I'd go into Comp. Mang. and set /boot active. In WinXP it doesn't let you have that option.

Right now on my machine

I only have this

fat32 of Win2k
/ ext3

swap

If you could tell me how to set a part. active via Linux rescue, that'd be great.

thanks.

While in rescue mode, issuse the command You'll get a command prompt. Get a feel for what partitions are on your disk. Type 'P'. Should give you an output like this:
The asterix marks the active partition. To change the active, use the 'a' command, and select the partition # (i.e.: /dev/hda5 = 5, etc). Also, remember that you must deactivate the partition you don't want bootable. For example: I want /dev/hda7 bootable, so I must activate that using the 'a' command, and deactivate the previous partition, also using the 'a' command.

Make sure that you are happy with the results... press 'p' again. If the asterix appears once on the partition you want to boot, save it by using 'w'.

Reboot!

That should be it. Good luck!

Directions were great.

Just went making Linux active, and rebooting

I got this message: Error Loading OS.

Remember, I installed FC3 on the MBR.

I'll try to install with /boot and make that active and install grub on /boot

Will that solve the issue?

That should work just fine. I've got my Bootloader on my boot partition. GRUB should install stage 1 on the MBR and stage 2 on the /boot partition.

Don't quote me on that... I'm no GRUB expert!

Great it worked.

Thanks a lot!!! :-D

I'll see how it goes on my laptop this weekend.

DO you know if Linux works well w/ a Dell Lat. C640 or laptops in general?

Yeah, I run Linux on a laptop now. Before you get started, there are some special things you should take into account. A good place to check out would be http://www.linux-on-laptops.com

Find your model, and give it a go. Feel free to e-mail me at jfryman@gmail.com if you need some extra help!

I'm the worst speller :-(

I would like to thank you once again for your help.

But new dell laptop hard drive just shipped, so I'll probably put Fedora on my laptop without dual booting. Do you backup your computer on dual booting? Do you update RHN updates or Windows Service Packs?

Also, do you have wireless configured on your Linux computer? Did Fedora recognize your wireless or Ethernet driver or did you have to install from another third-party download place?

Thanks once again! You are the best!!

Go Linux!

I probably should backup my laptop! (I backup the important stuff on CD-RW every so often using k3b) but I end up upgrading my Linux distro after every Core Update. I like a usable system, but I've done one too many 'yum update' commands too many, and because Linux Laptop support isn't that great, it'll break something (in every case thus far, Xorg 6.2 -> 6.3 has broken support for my Video Card). This is why it's important to check the Linux Laptop database and see what problems others have had and how they've overcome. Even more so, if there isn't anything, you can pave the path for others. That's the greatness of OSS! Helping people out when you can!

I have a good ol' Prism2 card which after fandangling the IRQ settings for PCMCIA, I was able to get working just fine using RH's default wlan drivers, but I opted for the host-ap suite to be able to do some cooler stuff with my wireless (kismet... etc..)

Your laptop might have an internal card, which may be an intel chipset. So far, there is basic support for this using an ndiswrapper, which is essentially a windows driver being used in linux.

Hope that answers your questions! Keep posting here and there, and I'm sure you'll hear from me again! I've been using linux for about six years now, and I'm by no means an expert, but I feel like I can start contributing back to the community that has helped me so much! Good luck to you!

My laptop was running fine... I login on the next reboot and get this:

/etc/X11/gdm/PreSession/Default: Registering your session with
/etc/X11/gdm/PreSession/Default: running: /usr/bin/X11
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc-common: line 45: 3328 Segmentation f
Agent pid 3342
Failed to execute message bus daemon: No such file or directory
EOF in dbus-launch reading address from bus daemon